Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Microbes That Create Life From Non-Life

Fig. 9: Schematic of microbial succession and biogeochemical processes in serpentinite mud at the Mariana forearc.
This schematic depicts lipid biomarker transitions from pelagic sediment communities to extremophiles adapted to high pH and redox conditions in serpentinite mud. The Mariana forearc biosphere is fueled by alkaline serpentinization fluids enriched in H₂, CH₄, DIC, and organic acids, sustaining specialized microbial communities. Lipid and stable carbon isotope data reveal a shift from relict methanogenic archaea, likely engaged in hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis, to a later ANME-SRB community mediating anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM). Changes in substrate availability likely drove this transition. Distinct lipid signatures, including unsaturated diethers, acyclic GDGTs, and ether-based glycolipids, highlight adaptations to pH stress, phosphate limitation, and fluctuating redox conditions. The presence of in-situ branched GDGTs suggests previously uncharacterized bacterial communities persisting in these ultra-oligotrophic conditions. The Mariana forearc serpentinite biosphere, shaped by episodic fluid flow and substrate shifts, provides insights into deep-sea subsurface habitability. DIC = dissolved inorganic carbon, ANME anaerobic methanotrophic archaea, SRB sulfate-reducing bacteria, AOM anaerobic oxidation of methane, GDGT glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraether.

Kumawat, P., Albers, E., Bach, W. et al. (2025).

Fats provide clues to life at its limits in the deep sea

Researchers at MARUM – Bremen University’s Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences – have made a discovery, just published open access in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, which, properly understood, should make depressing reading for creationists.

They have found living organisms both on and within the ocean floor, surviving in conditions where normal life would be impossible. These microorganisms inhabit mud volcanoes with a pH of 14, metabolising hydrogen and carbon to form methane by drawing energy from minerals in the surrounding rock. In other words, they live entirely without oxygen and with almost no organic matter, synthesising all they need from inorganic sources.

Informed creationists will recognise that these organisms directly refute their frequent assertion that life cannot arise from non-life — because producing life from non-life is precisely what these microorganisms are doing.

This also contradicts the biblical claim that all living things were created for the benefit of humans, since there is no conceivable way these organisms could serve any human purpose. Of course, to be fair, the authors of the Bible were completely ignorant of microorganisms, deep-ocean mud volcanoes, and chemosynthetic metabolism. They could only attempt to explain the larger creatures that lived in the limited region around their homes in the Canaanite hills.

And, as any informed creationist should also understand, these are exactly the sort of extreme conditions that biologists believe may have fostered the emergence of the earliest living organisms during the origin of life on Earth — once again undermining any claim that abiogenesis is impossible.

Background^ Chemosynthetic Extremophiles. Chemosynthetic extremophiles are microorganisms that survive in environments too hostile for most known life. Instead of relying on sunlight for energy (as photosynthetic organisms do), they extract energy from chemical reactions involving inorganic compounds such as hydrogen, methane, ammonia, or sulphides.

These organisms thrive in extreme conditions — high pressure, intense heat or cold, high salinity, or extreme acidity or alkalinity — where oxygen and organic nutrients are scarce or absent. They are commonly found around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, cold seeps, and mud volcanoes, as well as in acidic mines and alkaline lakes.

Chemosynthesis typically involves oxidising inorganic molecules (e.g. hydrogen sulphide, hydrogen, or iron) to obtain energy, which is then used to convert carbon dioxide or methane into organic compounds. This allows entire ecosystems — such as those around black smokers on the ocean floor — to exist entirely independent of sunlight.

These extremophiles are of major interest to biologists and astrobiologists because they demonstrate that life can originate and persist in conditions once thought uninhabitable. Their existence supports hypotheses that early life on Earth, and potentially elsewhere in the universe, may have begun in similar environments where energy was derived chemically rather than from sunlight.

The research is explained in a Universität Bremen news item.

Fats provide clues to life at its limits in the deep sea
Researchers use lipid biomarkers to reveal survival strategies in extreme ecosystems

Diverse life forms exist on and within the ocean floor. These primarily consist of microbes, tiny organisms that can cope with extreme environmental conditions. These include high pressures and salinities, as well as extreme pH values and a limited supply of nutrients. A team of researchers has now been able to detect microbial life in two newly discovered mud volcanoes with very high pH values. Their findings have been published in the professional journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Blue serpentinite mud from a newly discovered mud volcano in a gravity core. The samples have been studied by a team in order to decipher the survival strategies of microorganisms.
Photo: SO292/2 Expedition Science Party

In their study, first author Palash Kumawat of the Geosciences Department at the University of Bremen and his colleagues used lipid biomarker analyses to decipher the survival strategies of the microbes in this harsh ecosystem. The high pH value of 12 here is especially challenging for deep-sea life; This is one of the highest known value so far in ecosystems. In order to detect life at all, the researchers had to resort to special methods of trace analysis. In this situation, the detection of DNA can be ineffectual where there is a low number of living cells.

But we were able to detect fats. With the help of these biomarkers we were able to obtain insights into the survival strategies of methane- and sulfate-metabolizing microbes in this extreme environment.

Palash Kumawat, first author
Faculty of Geosciences
University of Bremen
Bremen, Germany.

Microbial communities metabolize carbon in the deep sea and thereby contribute to the global carbon cycle. However, the communities that the team describe in the publication draws its energy from minerals within rocks and gases such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen to produce methane, for example, an important greenhouse gas. These processes initially take place independently of the ocean above. The lipids also provide clues to the age of the microorganisms. If the cellular biomolecules are intact, they represent a living or recently dead community. If they are not intact, they are geomolecules, which means that they are fossil communities from the past. According to Kumawat, the combination of isotopes and the lipid biomarkers indicates that multiple microbial communities now live in this inhospitable habitat and have lived there in the past.

This distinction helps us when working in areas with extremely low biomass and nutrient deficiency.

Palash Kumawat.

Dr. Florence Schubotz, organic geochemist at MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen and co-author of the study, adds:
What is fascinating about these findings is that life under these extreme conditions, such as high pH and low organic carbon concentrations is even possible. Until now, the presence of methane-producing microorganisms in this system has been presumed, but could not be directly confirmed. Furthermore, it is simply exciting to obtain insights into such a microbial habitat because we suspect that primordial life could have originated at precisely such sites.

Dr. Florence Schubotz, co-author
MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences
University of Bremen
Bremen, Germany.

The samples for the study come from a sediment core that was retrieved by the Research Vessel Sonne in 2022 during Expedition SO 292/2. Not only were the scientists able to discover the previously unknown mud volcanoes of the Mariana forearc during this cruise, but also to sample them.
The samples were obtained as part of the Cluster of Excellence “The Ocean Floor – Earth's Uncharted Interface.” Palash Kumawat and his colleagues are now planning to cultivate organisms in an incubator to find out more about their nutrient preferences in inhospitable environments.

Publication:
Kumawat, P., Albers, E., Bach, W. et al.
Biomarker evidence of a serpentinite chemosynthetic biosphere at the Mariana forearc. Commun Earth Environ 6, 659 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02667-6

Abstract
Present-day serpentinization systems, such as that at the Mariana forearc, are prominent sources of reduced volatiles, including molecular hydrogen (H₂) and methane (CH₄), and are considered analogs for chemosynthetic ecosystems on early Earth. However, seepage of serpentinization fluids through mud volcanoes at the Mariana forearc seafloor is defined by high pH, and nutrient scarcity, creating challenging conditions for microbial life. We present geochemical and lipid biomarker evidence for a subsurface biosphere shaped by episodic substrate availability, highlighting microbial persistence across steep geochemical gradients within serpentinite mud. Light stable carbon isotope compositions from diagnostic lipids reveal a temporal shift from hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis to sulfate-dependent anaerobic methane oxidation. Membrane adaptations, including unsaturated diether, acyclic and branched tetraether, and ether-based isoprenoidal and non-isoprenoidal glycosidic lipids, reflect microbial strategies for coping with this extreme environment. Our findings establish the Mariana forearc as a unique serpentinite-hosted biosphere, where life operates at the fringes of habitability.

Introduction
The subseafloor biosphere is estimated to harbor up to 15% of the global biomass¹. Recent advances in deep biosphere research have improved our understanding of the distribution and diversity of microbial life in the rocky oceanic crust, especially around hydrothermal vents^2,3. This subseafloor biosphere has to adapt to limited carbon and nutrient availability, accompanied by harsh environmental conditions such as high temperature and pressure, elevated salinity, and/or extreme pH levels⁴. Serpentinization of mantle rocks by seawater can generate high levels of H₂^5,6 that, in turn, drives the abiotic reduction of carbon to form CH₄ and other organic compounds⁷, which can be oxidized by chemosynthetic organisms^8,9,10, forming the foundation for a serpentinite biosphere¹¹. The type locality for such a serpentinite biosphere is the Lost City hydrothermal vent field near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where hydrothermal fluids fuel microbial communities in active and inactive vent structures¹². Methanogenic archaea there are found in active brucite-calcite vents, whereas older carbonate chimneys host a syntropic consortium of anaerobic methanotrophic archaea (ANME) and sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) that perform the anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM)^13,14.

The process of serpentinization takes place in a range of geotectonic settings, including rifted continental margins, mid-oceanic ridges, transform faults, and convergent margins. Among the latter, the forearc of the Mariana subduction system is of particular interest because it provides access to serpentinization products from within an active subduction zone. There, dewatering of the subducting Pacific Plate leads to serpentinization of the mantle wedge of the overriding Philippine Sea Plate. Faults reaching 10–25 km deep into the forearc allow serpentinite, together with fluids derived from the subducting slab, to buoyantly rise and form large ‘serpentinite mud volcanoes’ on the seafloor^15,16 (Fig. 1a, c). Fluids venting from the mud volcanoes are cold (<3.5 °C), hyperalkaline (pH up to 12.6), and enriched in H₂ and CH₄ (both up to ~1 mM)^17,18 and slab-derived sulfate (SO₄²⁻; up to 28 mM)¹⁹. These fluids are also enriched in short-chain organic acids like acetate (0.04 mM) and formate (0.1 mM), contributing ~20–30% of the dissolved organic carbon (DOC)²⁰, and in methanol (0.03 mM)^20,21. The δ¹³C of CH₄ (−37‰ to 2‰), acetate (−8‰), formate (4.8‰) and methanol (2.3‰) point to their abiotic formation^17,21. While these serpentinization fluids sustain chemosynthetic life at the seafloor^22,23, the functioning and extent of the chemosynthetic microbial biosphere below the seafloor remains largely unknown. Cell counts in the serpentinite mud are variable, but overall low (101 to 106 cells cm−3)^20,24, presumably because of the high pH and intermittent fluid seepage^13,16. Extremophilic archaea are believed to perform AOM as inferred from the detection of phospholipid-derived diphytanyl diethers and reduced sulfur species in the formation fluids18. Metabolic transcripts for denitrification and AOM were interpreted as evidence for nitrate-dependent AOM within the serpentinite mud volcanoes²⁴. Although AOM is considered thermodynamically favorable here^19,25, direct evidence for AOM and its associated microorganisms is still lacking. Methanogenesis is a common metabolic strategy in serpentinization systems¹³, but since CH₄ formation at the Mariana forearc is dominantly abiotic, the extent of microbial methanogenesis remains uncharacterized.

Fig. 1: Study area and geological context of serpentinite mud volcanism in the Mariana subduction system.

a Bathymetry map of the Mariana subduction system showing the incoming Pacific Plate, the overriding Philippine Sea Plate, the Mariana Trench, and a subset of the known serpentinite mud volcanoes on the forearc seafloor. Stars mark the locations of the Pacman and Subetbia mud volcanoes investigated in this study. Bathymetry from GEBCO Compilation Group¹²⁵. b Bathymetry map showing the Pacman mud volcano and the location of gravity core GeoB24917-1 retrieved during expedition SO292/2. Bathymetric data collected during expedition SO292/2²⁶. c Schematic of serpentinite mud volcano formation, following serpentinization of the mantle wedge by slab-derived fluids, formation of H₂ and CH₄, and the rise of serpentinite mud and fluids through deep-seated faults towards the seafloor.

This study documents AOM coupled to sulfate reduction as a key metabolic process in the Mariana forearc, indicating the importance of methane cycling for the indigenous microbial community. Our findings also provide evidence of relict methanogenesis in the serpentinite mud, where its temporal distribution is possibly controlled by variable substrate availability. We present a comprehensive lipid biomarker and isotopic record from the Pacman and Subetbia mud volcanoes, providing insights into the habitability and survival strategies of extremophilic chemosynthetic life in this serpentinite biosphere.

Kumawat, P., Albers, E., Bach, W. et al.
Biomarker evidence of a serpentinite chemosynthetic biosphere at the Mariana forearc. Commun Earth Environ 6, 659 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02667-6

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Creationists often insist that “life cannot come from non-life,” claiming that the origin of life through natural processes — abiogenesis — is impossible. Yet these microorganisms thriving deep beneath the ocean floor undermine that argument completely. They demonstrate that life does not require sunlight, oxygen, or organic nutrients. Instead, it can sustain itself entirely through chemical reactions involving inorganic matter, precisely the kind of chemistry that would have been available on the early Earth long before photosynthesis or complex ecosystems evolved.

These microbes survive by harnessing energy from the oxidation of minerals and gases such as hydrogen and carbon, producing methane as a by-product. In doing so, they show that biological systems can indeed emerge and persist using nothing more than inorganic chemistry and environmental energy sources. If life can continue this way today — in conditions strikingly similar to those thought to exist on the early Earth — then it is perfectly reasonable to infer that the same processes could once have given rise to life itself.

Creationists’ claim that life from non-life violates natural law is based on a false analogy with modern life, which relies on pre-existing organic systems. But these extremophiles illustrate that the boundary between “non-living” chemistry and “living” biochemistry is not a rigid wall — it is a continuum. The metabolic reactions that sustain these organisms are direct chemical extensions of the mineral and geochemical reactions occurring in their surroundings. Life in such places does not appear magically; it emerges naturally from the physical and chemical conditions of its environment.

Far from being a problem for evolutionary science, discoveries like this one strengthen the case for a natural origin of life. They show that even today, the chemistry of life and the chemistry of rocks remain intimately connected. To deny that such chemistry could, under the right conditions, cross the threshold into life is to deny the very evidence creationists claim to seek — evidence that life can, and demonstrably does, arise from the non-living world through the workings of natural law.

Sadly, the same creationists who continue to parrot the 'no life from non-life' fallacy won't have understood a word of that and will continue to make proven false claims.

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