Ecosystems of Rock-Eating Fungus And Tardigrades Found Thriving Deep Within a Gas Shale

Ecosystems of Rock-Eating Fungus And Tardigrades Found Thriving Deep Within a Gas Shale

Just about every corner of Earth we look at seems to hold signs of life....

We have sharper maps of Mars than of most of Earth's deep ocean floor, and the little of it we have reached rewrote biology: in 1977 a submersible found thriving life around hot vents in total darkness, fed by chemistry rather than sunlight

The least-known place on Earth is not some remote patch of desert or ice. It is most of the planet’s own seafloor. We have sharper maps of the surface of Mars than we do of the deep ocean that covers well over half our world. That sounds like a line invented for effect, but it holds up, and it says something about how genuinely hard the deep ocean is to reach. It is worth taking seriously, not least because what little we have found down there o…