Undercover Cells: New Estimate of the Microbes Beneath the Continents

deepcarbon.net

44 points·bryanrasmussen··7 comments

So the estimate is:

>200 to 600 octillion microbes (2 to 6x10^29 cells) live in the continental subsurface.

Ok, can you give me that in blue whales?

>These cells represent about four to 13 petagrams of carbon, (each petagram is about one billion tons, or more than five million blue whales), which is approximately four to 10 times less than earlier estimates.

Great.

I'd say that 4-13 billion tons is a lot.

Quick grab from the Wikipedia page re biomass.

humans: ~0.1 billion tonnes

domesticated animals: ~0.7 billion tonnes

earthworms: ~1 billion tonnes

annual cereal crops: ~2.3 billion tonnes

Antarctic krill: ~0.5 billion tonnes

fish: 0.8-2.0 billion tonnes

According to https://www.quora.com/How-many-cells-does-a-blue-whale-have There are about 10^16 cells in a blue whale.

So maybe about 10^13 blue whales? Seems unlikely.

One cell type (prokaryote, tiny) is not like the other (eukaryote, huge)

Serious question: is "blue whales" a common informal unit for biomass?

I think 'large animal that people are familiar with' is for science popularizing articles. Let's say it was less than a 10,000 blue whales, they might have wanted to calculate it in African Elephants.

is cell count / microorganism density relatively constant through species?

How different would 'a blue whale worth of lab mice' be if counting volume/mass/cells/microorganisms?

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