Letters From a Lightless World

This month a deep-sea consortium released its full catalogue from a descent of nearly eleven kilometres into the southwest Pacific. The same week, two ground-based observatories reported a faint, below-threshold echo of a methane signal around a small star forty-two light-years away.

Aisake Tuita, microbial ecologist at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, was inside the sphere on the way down. He spent nineteen hours at the bottom collecting the animals now reshaping how we think about life without a sun.