Living deep underground ain't easy. In addition to hellish temperatures and pressures, there's not a lot to eat. Which is why oil reservoirs are the microbes' cornucopia in this hidden realm. Microbes feast on many oil reservoirs, but it has been unclear how the microorganisms got to those locales. One proposal has been that the microbes colonize a pool of dead algae corpses and then go along for the ride as the pool gets buried deeper and deeper and the algae slowly become oil. That's the so-called "burial and isolation" hypothesis. But under that set of rules each pool of...
