Steve Connor
weather.com
March 21, 2013
Scientist have found a thriving community of microbes living at the deepest known point on the surface of the Earth – a massive underwater canyon in the Pacific Ocean 6.8 miles below sea level.
The bacteria were recovered from muddy sediments at a point underneath the central west Pacific called Challenger Deep in the huge Mariana Trench, a gigantic chasm in the seabed which is big enough and deep enough to swallow Mount Everest entirely.
Marine biologists said they were astonished to find such an abundance of microbial life-forms living off the dead and decaying matter that sinks to the deepest parts of the ocean where pressures are more than a thousand times greater than at sea level.
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