There’s a lot going on 2500 meters below sea level. It’s dark, temperatures can climb to 300 degrees Celsius near thermal vents, and the pressure is about 250 atmospheres. If humans could swim at that depth, the pressure exerted on the body would be equivalent to the weight of about 30 Boeing 747 jumbo jets, says Peter Girguis at Harvard University. And yet the water at this depth is teeming with life, with more biomass in 1 cubic meter than in a cubic meter of the richest rain forest (Mar Ecol Progr, 148:135-43).
Scientists know relatively little about what that biomass is, however. “There’s so much we don’t know because we can’t culture these [deep sea] microbes,” says Girguis. “We know they’re down there making RNA, but we don’t really know what they’re doing.” The animals that live down there are fascinating, he says: Most lack mouths or anuses, and ...
