In the northern Pacific Ocean, buried 20 meters below the ocean
floor, are bacteria that live life in the extreme slow lane.
They have not received any fresh sources of food since they were
buried 86 million years ago, when dinosaurs still walked the
land. Still, they cling to life by using up the little oxygen
available to them at an incredibly slow rate. “Their activity is
so slow that on our timescale, nothing happens at all,” said
Hans Røy from Aarhus University, who discovered the microbes.
“It’s much less than any laboratory culture we have.” “Besides
being interesting on its own, it has large implication for the
potential of life in other low energy environments such as the
subsurface of Mars,” added Arthur Spivack from the University of
Rhode Island, who was not involved in the study. The study,
published today (May 17) in Science, is part of Røy’s ongoing
effort to understand the organisms that live in marine
sediments, which could account for 90 percent of all microbes in
the world. “We’re looking a