Sponge Bob Square Dance

Another reason for the Scientifik Screamin' Meemie Brigade to dance around in carbon calculating circles.

Miles beneath the sea surface, buried beneath the seafloor sediment, a relatively unstudied ecosystem of bacteria and other microbes teems with activity in the Earth's oceanic crust. Some scientists think this system could hold the largest reservoir of life on Earth, but direct measurements from the difficult-to-reach region remain scarce.

Now, an international team of researchers based at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, Maine, have developed a new model that they say offers the best estimates yet for how much oxygen these microbes may consume — a measure that could be used in future studies to determine the size of this ecosystem.

[...]If the crustal microbial population is as abundant as some scientists think it is, then it would comprise a significant but currently overlooked component of Earth's carbon cycle, said study co-author Beth Orcutt, of the Bigelow Lab. Further study of these ecosystems will help clarify their role in the nutrient cycles that control the abundance of life on Earth, she said.

Obama and the Dems will figure out a way to tax us for this and send the money to liberal universities as grants; call it the Subsurface Hydrocarbon Interdiction Tax.

Story here.

The Bigelow Laboratory has three campuses, one of which is:

"Center for Ocean Biogeochemistry and Climate Change - Research conducted here will address questions of ocean biogeochemistry and climate change at many scales, from local to global, and from individual cells to entire ocean basins."

This is another excuse to latch on to whatever fiscal teat you can find.