South Dakota's Underground Lakes May Hold Purest Water On Earth

http://bit.ly/1zfNXza Hundreds of feet beneath the Black Hills, a team of scientists and researchers snake through dark, narrow and silent corridors of ancient rock to reach their goal: what is thought to be some of the purest water on Earth. The crew of National Park Service scientists that's anchored by microbiologist Hazel Barton travels sporadically to the lowest reaches of South Dakota's Wind Cave National Park to study a series of underground lakes, which were discovered in the 1960s and aren't home to any animal life or even easily detectable microscopic organisms. But Barton, from the University of Akron, has discovered there is bacteria — albeit scant — in the lakes. She's beginning to analyze about six years of data and hopes to decipher how the bacteria survives, answer questions about how it interacted before multicellular organisms came along and perhaps find new sources of antibiotics. "It has the potential to answer a lot of questions that we have in biology that you can't answer anywhere else because you have levels of complexity," she said. http://huff.to/1Um3KoX


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