LIFE IN THE ABYSS

摘要

South Africa's gold mines are crawling with demons, each sporting a whip-like tail and a voracious appetite. Not that the miners are worried. These demons are barely visible to the naked eye. They are big news for people studying life on Earth, though. "The discovery floored me," says Tullis Onstott, a geologist at Princeton University, who discovered these nematode worms swimming in the water-filled fissures of the Beatrix gold mine in 2011. The fact is, complex organisms just shouldn't be able to live so far beneath the Earth's surface. The nourishment and oxygen that animals need to survive are in short supply just tens of metres below ground, let alone 1.3 kilometres down. Noting that the