In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

At their base, archaea – the ancients – feasted on methane and sulphur, converting gases into sugars and founding the food chain. The archaea – small, structurally simple, distinct from bacteria – were some of the first living things, appearing 3 or 4 billion years ago in a chaotic era of mass volcanic eruptions. At some point long after this, something even more radical happened, and archaea grouped with bacteria to form a new kind of cell, containing a nucleus. All multicellular life – plants, fungi, animals – come from this. But archaea still exist. They’re drawn to inhospitable regions – Antarctic ice-sheets, the salt plains of Chile and Eritrea – but their most exotic site of all, arguably, is in our stomachs. Presumably they act symbiotically, and help us in some way. No one’s really sure. Among other strange characteristics, archaea have the ability to become dormant, and to reanimate after tens of thousands of years.

This is all so cool!