Earth's Untallied Biological Bounty, from L.A. Suburbs to Deep Seabed Sediments →

The extent and diversity of Earth’s sheath of living things continues to surprise scientists, making Howard Ensign Evans’s classic 1966 book “Life on a Little-Known Planet” ever more germane. Here is fresh evidence from some Los Angeles back yards and the “deadest” depths of deep-sea sediments:

Recent chats with Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University drew me this week to remarkable new discoveries of traces of life in sediment layers up to 200 feet beneath the South Pacific Ocean seabed that were long presumed to be sterile.

The findings, from analysis led by Steven D’Hondt of the University of Rhode Island, were described earlier this month in a news release with this remarkable title: “No Limit to Life in Sediment of Ocean’s Deadest Region.”