224: life in unlikely places

I found this fascinating article in the New Scientist today, about progressive discoveries of single-cell organisms living many miles beneath the Earth's surface. Apparently, John Parkes, a geobiologist at the University of Cardiff in the UK, is the latest person to have documented such lifeforms - in this case at extraordinarily high densities, 1.6km beneath the sea floor and at temperatures as high as 100 degrees centigrade. He and other experts in his field believe this raises the possibility of living things being found in even more unlikely places - on our planet and perhaps on others. It also confirms just how much more there is for us to learn about Earth, and life... it's a world of tremendous potential, it would seem, and that must give cause for hope.