THE CASE for life in the underworld is stronger than ever, say
Swedish scientists, who have found the remains of micro-
organisms that once flourished in granite more than 200 metres
underground. Earlier this decade scientists claimed to have
found bacteria in a 1.8-billion-year-old granite layer nearly
200 metres below Sweden's Baltic coast. The drill that sampled
the rock passed through a fracture, and water found there
contained large numbers of bacteria. Sceptics claimed that those
organisms were contaminants from the surface that had been
introduced as the core was drilled. But Karsten Pedersen of
Gothenburg University in Sweden was not one of them. "I was
convinced there is a deep biosphere," he says. "However, it is
difficult to prove unambiguously that it is there." Pedersen and
his colleagues studied a core drilled from the same site on
Sweden's coast for evidence that microorganisms were living in
the rock long before ... To continue reading this article,
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