Global diversity of microbial communities in marine sediment

Microbial life in marine sediment contributes substantially to global biomass and is a crucial component of the Earth system. Subseafloor sediment includes both aerobic and anaerobic microbial ecosystems, which persist on very low fluxes of bioavailable energy over geologic time. However, the taxonomic diversity of the marine sedimentary microbial biome and the spatial distribution of that diversity have been poorly constrained on a global scale. We investigated 299 globally distributed sediment core samples from 40 different sites at depths of 0.1 to 678 m below the seafloor. We obtained ~47 million 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene sequences using consistent clean subsampling and experimental procedures, which enabled accurate and unbiased comparison of all samples. Statistical analysis reveals significant correlations between taxonomic composition, sedimentary organic carbon concentration, and presence or absence of dissolved oxygen. Extrapolation with two fitted species–area relationship models indicates taxonomic richness in marine sediment to be 7.85 × 10³ to 6.10 × 10⁵ and 3.28 × 10⁴ to 2.46 × 10⁶ amplicon sequence variants for Archaea and Bacteria, respectively. This richness is comparable to the richness in topsoil and the richness in seawater, indicating that Bacteria are more diverse than Archaea in Earth’s global biosphere.