If a person is lucky, can he ... maybe survive 100 years? Jonathan, a 183-year-old Aldabra giant tortoise that currently lives in St. Helena, is currently the oldest living land mammal in the world.
But microbes hit us all. With a big gap. Scientists have recently harvested microbes from sediments found at the bottom of the South Pacific and over 100 million years old.
These very living microbes are older than some dinosaurs.
The microbes were found in clay samples on board the JOIDES Resolution research ship and survived almost 80 meters below the sea floor under an astounding 5.7 kilometers of water.
After Dr. Yuki Morono of the Japanese Agency for Marine Geosciences and Technology extracted the microbes from the sediment, he incubated the microbes for a year and a half. The microbes initially contained ten different major types of bacteria, but grew and diversified during incubation.
The organisms the team has isolated need oxygen to survive, and traces of the life-giving gas have been found in the sediment. Still, the survival of microbes on the ocean floor is astonishing because they have no access to sunlight or other nutrients.
For scientists, the ability of the microbes to survive in old, low-energy environments is the most interesting part of the find.
"The most exciting part of this study is that it basically shows that life in the ancient sediments of Earth's oceans is unlimited," Steven D'Hondt, co-author of the study, told ABC.
Life ... um, find a way.
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