A vast carpet of underwater microbes that covers an area as big as Greece has been discovered on the seabed off the west coast of South America. Scientists believe the microbes could be directly descended from some of the earliest life forms to have evolved on Earth.
The discovery is part of a series of astonishing finds made since 2000 as part of the decade-long Census of Marine Life, an international project by more than 2,000 scientists from 80 countries to explore the largely unknown life which inhabits the oceans.
The "microbial mat" lives in a deep layer of seawater that is deprived of both light and oxygen and seems to have survived by "eating" hydrogen sulphide and "breathing" nitrates. It could represent a present-day community of organisms descended from primitive microbes which first evolved about 3 billion years ago, when there was no oxygen on the planet.
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