The Very Hungry Microbes That Could, Just Maybe, Cool the Planet

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By By Raymond Zhong, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: Fifty miles off the Tuscan coast, in a sparkling blue expanse broken only by rocky, forbidding islets, including the real-life Island of Montecristo, ancient creatures are roosting beneath the waves. They spend their days feasting on an unlikely source of nourishment: methane, a potent greenhouse gas that leaks out of cracks in the seafloor. Lately, researchers have been trying to put these microorganisms to work on an urgent task. If their appetites can be redirected to other sources of their favorite gas — namely, the hundreds of millions of tons of planet-warming methane emitted each year from oil and gas sites, livestock and wetlands — then they might just help slow climate change. First, though, researchers need to better understand these microbes, which have been on this planet for billions of years but remain enigmatic in many ways.... 

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