Radiosynthesis - living on radioactive decay energy

[Everything4404]

A lot of uranium deposits are biogenic, though their activity is more so related to concentrating them and not living off them. And the geology does most of the work but anyways, this raises an interesting theory where the microbes do live off them but also have evolved to concentrate them maybe to support that lifestyle.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15538

Nikolai, Prince of Denmark — 05/14/2021
But where does it being a main food source for all deep crustal life come from?

destrucules — 05/14/2021
Oh, that? That comes out of studies of Kidd Creek, where microbiologists were looking at fluid inclusions that have been hydrologically and chemically isolated for ~2 Gyr. It was found that quiescent radioactive decay from the walls of the inclusions was sufficient to create a small chemical disequilibrium in the water, and active chemolithoautotrophs (we need an acronym for that or something) were found feeding on that disequilibrium. As far as I'm aware, only a minority of organisms directly feed on radiation, but since uranium is one of the three main radioactive elements in Earth's crust, and since the deep biosphere, or at least the deep continental biosphere, seems to be largely fed by radioactivity, uranium must be one of the major energy sources for the deep biosphere. It's not the main source or anything, but it's one of the main ones