Crude oil and gas naturally escape from the seabed in many places known as “seeps.” There, these hydrocarbons move up from source rocks through fractures and sediments toward the surface, where they leak out of the ground and sustain a diversity of densely populated habitats in the dark ocean. Alkanes are already degraded before they reach the sediment surface. Even deep down in the sediment, where no oxygen exists, it provides an important energy source for subsurface microorganisms, amongst them some of the so-called archaea.
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Source: Phys.org