Word: oceanic
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...success of the experiment made it all worthwhile. Over the course of each evening, Langford watched the earthshine brighten dramatically when sunlight bounced off the Indian Ocean and dim as the African continent rotated into view. The implications for the exoplanet search are profound: If we can see the effect in earthshine, we might also see it in the light of distant world...
...What there was, however, was life. The samples Mikucki collected did not teem with a riot of different microbial species the way ocean water does, but there was at least one species, thriving and dividing and doing all of the other things single-celled species do. "How [were] they able to persist below hundreds of meters of ice and live in permanently cold and dark conditions over hundreds of millions of years?" Mickucki asks...
...trick, she found, was that they learned how to change their diet. When Mikucki studied the organisms' DNA and energy-processing systems, she found that they were indeed descended from species that once lived in the open ocean. Underneath the ice, they were deprived of light to run photosynthesis, and instead they relied on what they found around them - principally sulfur and iron - to generate energy. The genes responsible for that alternative metabolism are also found in other marine organisms but they're less important to those species because the oceans provide more options for food...
...hold - life that would have then had to retreat into underground water deposits and make the same kind of hurry-up adaptation Mikucki's microbes did. Similar adaptive metabolism could be in evidence on the Jovian moon Europa, where a layer of surface ice may cover a globe-girdling ocean. (See pictures of Mars' patterns...
...waters they sought to protect, says Lehr, were "an El Dorado for fishing fleets of many nations." A 2006 study published in the journal Science predicted that the current rate of commercial fishing would virtually empty the world's oceanic stocks by 2050. Yet, Somalia's seas still offer a particularly fertile patch for tuna, sardines and mackerel, and other lucrative species of seafood, including lobsters and sharks. In other parts of the Indian Ocean region, such as the Persian Gulf, fishermen resort to dynamite and other extreme measures to pull in the kinds of catches that are still...