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The dry valleys and frigid peaks of Antarctica present a formidable
challenge to any life forms that would attempt to live there and
yet, microbial colonies thrive there, subsisting on the only
available food: rocks. With that kind of hardiness, these microbes
at the "rock-bottom" of the food web might also have been the
organisms chiefly responsible for spreading life on Earth when the
planet was still in its infancy. Scripps researcher Hubert Staudigel
led a team to the frozen continent to understand how they work. In
the process, the scientists had to come up with their own adaptation
strategies to be able to work in one of the harshest places on
Earth.
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