Sunlight is nonexistent, so many organisms such as archaea and extremophiles convert the heat, methane, and sulfur compounds provided by black smokers into energy through a process called chemosynthesis.
32.
By contrast, the hydrogen compounds used in chemosynthesis are high in energy, so chemosynthesis can take place in the absence of sunlight ( e . g ., around a hydrothermal vent ).
33.
By contrast, the hydrogen compounds used in chemosynthesis are high in energy, so chemosynthesis can take place in the absence of sunlight ( e . g ., around a hydrothermal vent ).
34.
Buckminster Fuller first described the concept in his 1970 paper " Cosmic Costing ", contrasting the photosynthesis on which natural capital and sustainable infrastructural capital depend, with the chemosynthesis of extracting and using fossil fuels.
35.
It principally occurs through the process of photosynthesis, which uses light as its source of energy, but it also occurs through chemosynthesis, which uses the oxidation or reduction of inorganic chemical compounds as its source of energy.
36.
Chemoautotrophs, organisms that obtain carbon through chemosynthesis, are phylogenetically diverse, but groups that include conspicuous or biogeochemically-important taxa include the sulfur-oxidizing gamma and epsilon proteobacteria, the aquificaeles, the methanogenic archaea and the neutrophilic iron-oxidizing bacteria.
37.
Further expeditions involved quantitative sampling of habitats in different areas, from the Mediterranean Ridge to the eastern Nile deep-sea fan . have also revealed chemosynthesis-based communities that showed a considerable similarity to the symbiont-bearing fauna of eastern Mediterranean cold seeps.
38.
This contrasts with holophytic nutrition, in which energy and organic building blocks are obtained through photosynthesis or chemosynthesis, and with saprozoic nutrition, in which digestive enzymes are released externally and the resulting monomers ( small organic molecules ) are absorbed directly from the environment.
39.
Use of the term " chemosynthesis " reinforces the view that this is feasible by pointing out that several alternate means of creating complex proteins, mineral shells of mollusks and crustaceans, etc ., evolved naturally, not all of them dependent on photosynthesis and a food chain from the sun via chlorophyll.
40.
In biochemistry, "'chemosynthesis "'is the biological conversion of one or more carbon-containing molecules ( usually carbon dioxide or methane ) and nutrients into organic matter using the oxidation of inorganic compounds ( e . g . hydrogen gas, hydrogen sulfide ) or methane as a source of energy, rather than sunlight, as in photosynthesis.
