Life Found a Mile Below Sea floor

The Ocean Drilling Program obtained core samples from deep under the ocean, allowing scientists to detect extreme microbes living a kilometre or two below the sea floor. A coring sample off the coast of Newfoundland turned up single-celled microbes living in searing temperatures about 1,626 meters below the sea floor. According to R. John  Parkes, Geobiologist, Cardiff University -in Wales, "these are probably not only the deepest, but the hottest organisms found in deep marine sediments. It's

fascinating to know what proportion of our planet actually has living organisms in it." Parkes and his colleagues analysed core samples returned from the Ocean drilling Program. They found evidence for  prokaryotic cells, which lack a central nucleus, that appear to be from the archaea family, a sister domain to bacteria. The newly-discovered life likely gets its energy from methane. It thrives in 111 million-year-old rocks, enduring temperatures between 60 to 100 de­grees Celsius. There's no light around and there's no oxygen around. In this extreme environment, life is relatively. sparse.