Life at the Edge

It was the most amazing creature Nea had never seen. It loomed large and strange outside the bubble of her submersible, swimming in waters where no animal had any place being.

Nea's ship was at the bottom of the ocean, resting on its sandy floor, and she was perhaps a mere hundred meters or so from a crack leading to the planet's molten interior. Stretched above that crack, reaching tall into the crushing pressure of the water above it, stood a sooty-colored "black smoker," an area where the planet's heat rushed out at astoundingly hot temperatures and spewed minerals like sulfur, copper, iron, and zinc, all toxic to life as we knew it. Scientists were agreed: nothing could survive in such an environment.

Except something did – and not just one something, but many.

The focus of her attention at the moment, though, was a tube worm, a wriggling creature about eight feet long, with tentacles at one end squirming in the turbulent seas that somehow not only lived but thrived in the heat, the pressure, and the absence of Sun and oxygen. Nea turned the submersible’s cameras on the worm to take as many pictures as possible. Then she maneuvered the craft’s arms to take samples for later study.

Day after day, week after week, she returned to the site to gather more information and to analyze it so she could understand this strange anomaly, and what she found was literally jaw-dropping. This enormous worm, an order of magnitude bigger than the biggest one she had ever seen, didn’t need sunlight, didn’t need oxygen. Instead, it ate sulfur! Its tentacles swept in the smoker’s deadly mix, and ancient bacteria that lined the worm’s hollow tube converted it into energy. Here she, with all her technology and bottled oxygen, was the outsider, adapted to an environment unfathomable to these life forms. Staring into the abyss, she felt humbled. Life was indeed stranger here on Earth than any alien species could ever be.

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