Karen Lloyd: This deep-sea mystery is changing our understanding of life

This deep-sea mystery is changing our understanding of life

How deep into the Earth can we go and still find life? Marine microbiologist Karen Lloyd introduces us to deep-subsurface microbes: tiny organisms that live buried meters deep in ocean mud and have been on Earth since way before animals. Learn more about these mysterious microbes, which refuse to grow in the lab and seem to have a fundamentally different relationship with time and energy than we do.

Tiny microbes thriving hundreds of meters below the ocean floor challenge what scientists thought possible about life. These organisms survive with almost no energy, living in ancient mud where fresh food hasn't arrived for millions of years. Attempts to grow them in labs have failed, hinting that their secret ingredient might not be nutrients, but time itself. Their existence reveals that life can flourish in ways radically different from everything shaped by the Sun.