What’s it like to travel right down to the bottom of the ocean?

Deep sea microbiologist Julie Huber should know. Her group, at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, USA, is trying to uncover more about the microbes living in the deepest darkest depths of the ocean. But that’s not all – there are even microbes living thousands of metres beneath the ocean floor itself, within the rocks and sediment.

This is an environment that couldn’t be more different to our world on land – no light, huge pressures, underwater volcanoes and hardly any nutrients. So what kind of microbes do we see living there, and how do they manage to make a living?

Image credit: NOAA Submarine Ring of Fire 2006

Music: Sacred Motion by staRpauSe