Bacteria Discovered on Vulcano That Quickly Cleans the Atmosphere

A bacterium has been discovered on Vulcano that devours CO2 particles “incredibly quickly” and quickly cleans the atmosphere.
The discovery – as revealed by the website ilmessaggero.it – was made by a team of experts led by Braden Tierney, of Harvard Medical School, and financed by the US company “Seed Health”, known for the development of probiotics.

Experts sent a sample of these cyanobacteria to the laboratories of the famous Boston university and overseas they confirmed that the aeolian microbes grew much faster than their peers. The particular microbe, belonging to the "cyanobacteria" family, was observed for the first time by some American scientists last September in a thermal spring of volcanic origin on the Aeolian island.

“There are microbes that ‘eat’ carbon dioxide (CO2) particles – American scientists claim – and then transform it into ‘biomass’, or natural organic materials that can be used as a source of clean energy”.

In fact, on the Aeolian island, some American scientists noticed that one of these organisms was able to carry out the process "surprisingly quickly".
"It is a particular type of microbe - they explain - belonging to the group of "cyanobacteria", unicellular photosynthetic organisms that live mainly in aquatic environments".
Precisely in a thermal spring of volcanic origin, rich in carbon dioxide, the American researchers observed the bacterium native to the Aeolian Islands extracting carbon from CO2 molecules at a record pace, higher than that of any other cyanobacterium classified so far.
“It may not be a coincidence – they add – that the discovery of this particular microbe took place in the vicinity of a volcano surrounded by water. In fact, volcanic activity produces, among other gases, also enormous quantities of carbon dioxide: according to a study by the American Geophysical Union, the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes in a year varies between 100 and 500 million tons. The most polluting volcano in the world is Etna, which alone contributes to 10% of global emissions from volcanic activity (over 9 thousand tons of CO2 per day)”.
And they believe that “it is therefore possible – even if not yet proven – that the CO2-rich water basins near the island of Vulcano have somehow stimulated the proliferation of cyanobacteria with above-average photosynthesis capacities”.
According to Tierney and colleagues, “the new Aeolian microbe also had another unusual property: it descended deeper into the water, which could help it absorb more CO2.”
In February, Tierney’s team also explored hot springs in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, in the United States, where CO2 levels are even higher. These results are still being analyzed.

[Translated from Italian]

Source: Giornale Di Sicilia, Bartolino Leone, Author

Date: 2023-04-19