By Environment Correspondent Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) -
Microbes are thriving in surprising numbers at the deepest spot
in the oceans, the 11,000-metre (36,000 ft) Mariana Trench in
the Pacific, despite crushing pressures in sunless waters,
scientists said. Dead plants and fish were falling as food for
microscopic bugs even to the little-known hadal depths, parts of
the seabed deeper than 6,000 meters and named after Hades, the
god of the underworld in Greek mythology, they said. The
presence of life in the trench also shows how the greenhouse gas
carbon dioxide, vital for the growth of tiny marine plants at
the ocean surface, can eventually get buried in the depths in a
natural process that slows climate change. A Danish-led team of
scientists, using a robot to take samples, found double the
amount of bacteria and other microbes munching away on debris at
the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific than at
a nearby site 6,000 meters deep. "It's surprising there was so
much bacterial activity,