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Life at Vents & Seeps


Move Over, Mars: The Search for Life on Saturn’s Largest Moon

Nautilus

Alien microbes could be flourishing in the underground seas of Titan and the solar system’s other ocean worlds. “The great thing about hydrothermal vents is that they provide a lot of energy sources for microbial life that doesn’t include sunlight,” says Julie Huber, a marine chemist at WHOI.

NASA eyes the ocean: How the deep sea could unlock outer space

The Christian Science Monitor

“When hydrothermal vents were discovered in 1977, it very much flipped biology on its end,” says Julie Huber, an oceanographer who studies life in and below the seafloor at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) on Cape Cod. “People knew that organisms could live off of chemical energy, but they didn’t imagine they could support animal ecosystems.”