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Do we know how these microbes moved into these environments? Any idea if it was "surface water to underground" or the reverse? Microbes falling into a rift and moving sideways like cave dwellers taking up residence in a cave and adapting over generations?

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In his book "The Deep Hot Biosphere" Thomas Gold argued that life probably originated deep underground. Gold is a pretty controversial figure, but this hypothesis makes sense for a number of reasons: the underground environment is a lot more stable than the surface, and the chemistry to extract energy from the chemicals in that environment is a lot simpler than the chemistry to extract energy from sunlight. So it makes sense that underground chemosynthesis would emerge before photosynthesis.

Gold seemed an interesting character - I was just reading his Wikipedia.

The WaPo article on him is good

>As an astronomer and geophysicist, he says, "it always seemed absurd to me to see petroleum hydrocarbons on other planets, where there was obviously never any vegetation, even as we insist that on Earth they must be biological in origin." https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/features/daily/h...

It’s been known for quite a while that most life actually generated from the deep and then seated upwards. Photosynthesis came well after these creatures.

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