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.
One place they like to live is the bottom of the ocean, where methane buried inside the Earth seeps up through fissures in the seabed. In 2017, workers on fishing boats reported seeing a 30-foot jet of dirty water erupt out of the sea near Montecristo. Geologists discovered a string of offshore mud volcanoes, bubbling methane into the cerulean sea.
But nobody had tried to capture the organisms that eat the gas there until this year, when Braden Tierney and two colleagues sailed into the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the western coast of Italy, on a cool summer night.
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