On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Osama Alian. Osama studies how a community of microbes survives in a hydrothermal vent system deep in the Atlantic Ocean in an environment that’s funky, unique, and probably present everywhere in the universe where there are water and rock interacting with each other. It’s a cool location to study because it challenges our ideas about how life generates the energy it needs in really isolated and extreme places, but also gives us a window into how maybe life could be surviving elsewhere in the universe like the subsurface of Mars and ocean worlds like Europa and Enceladus which don’t look too different from that spot in the Atlantic!
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