I love Atlas Obscura, but this entry is kind of missing the point. Every place on earth is teeming with microbes. Five thousand feet under the floor of the Ch

I love Atlas Obscura, but this entry is kind of missing the point. Every place on earth is teeming with microbes. Five thousand feet under the floor of the Challenger deep, it's teeming with microbes. In sulfur hot springs where the water is 20 degrees above boiling, it's teeming with microbes. Lakes so salty they're literally painful to drink: microbes. Inside every single specimen of multicellular life: thousands of species of microbes that live nowhere else, each one doing something vital to help keep the host alive. Microbes are the dominant variety of life on this planet. They take up more than half the biomass. In terms of things like the oxygen, carbon and nitrogen cycles, we're just passengers on planet Earth. The bugs are in charge [1]. [1]. Except the bugs are vastly outnumbered by the viruses (which aren't alive). For every gram of live cells there are almost ten grams of viruses.