These microbial communities have learned to live at Earth’s most extreme reaches

These microbial communities have learned to live at Earth’s most extreme reaches

A thin slice of rock from oceanic crust at Atlantis Bank in the Indian Ocean, where slow-living bacteria have been found. (Frieder Klein/WHOI)

Earth’s deepest life scavenges carbon In one of the deepest layers of Earth’s crust ever explored, researchers are finding life. An analysis of rock samples from the bottom of the Indian Ocean has revealed microbes adapted to life within nutrient-poor hairline fractures in the Earth. Researchers found several species of bacteria, fungi and archaea that live in the rocks and feed on carbon from fragments of amino acids and other organic molecules carried in deep ocean currents. Nature | 5 min readReference: Nature paper

70% The proportion of all microbes on Earth that are thought to live in places long deemed inhospitable, such as deep sediments under the oceans, the cold deserts of Antarctica and the stratosphere.