It’s Alive!
It’s technically possible that younger, more modern bacteria could have seeped down into the clay, Ars Technica reports, but the scientists think it was too densely packed to allow that.
“What we found was that life extends all the way from the seafloor to the underlying rocky basement,” University of Rhode Island oceanographer and study co-author Steven D’Hondt said in an accompanying video. “And what [lead author Yuki Morono’s] paper now shows is that those organisms are not only alive in the deepest form of sediment, but they’re capable of growing and dividing.”
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