BREMEN, Germany, Oct. 18 (UPI) -- German scientists say they've discovered methane-consuming microbes are helping to control Earth's global warming.
Antje Boetius and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen say the single-celled organisms help to temper the amount of methane belched into the oceans by underwater mud volcanoes.
The researchers studied the active Haakon Mosby Mud Volcano -- south of Spitsbergen in the Norwegian-Greenland Sea -- and discovered three key communities of methane-consuming microbes.
One newly discovered community belongs to the archaea domain, -- a group of unicellular organisms quite separate from bacteria and eukaryotes. The second is a bacterium that breaks down methane using oxygen. And the third is another archaean, which, along with its associated bacteria, breaks down methane using sulfate.
The upward flow of sulfate- and oxygen-free fluids from the volcano limits the habitat of the methanotrophs. As a result, the microbes are able to break down only about 40 percent of the methane emitted from this volcano.
The research appears in the current issue of the journal Nature.
