article_snippet.sent: Those hoping to meet an alien creature may well do better to look beneath the waves than beyond our own atmosphere.
article_snippet.sent: Scientists have discovered strange new organisms that infect the primitive forms of life that live deep below the ocean floor.
article_snippet.sent: Life has been discovered nearly a mile and half underground, raising hopes bacteria might be able to survive deep beneath the surface of other planets.
article_snippet.sent: Researchers found the single-celled organisms living inside coal beds more than 8,000ft (2,440 metres) below the seabed off the coast of Japan.
article_snippet.sent: It is the deepest life has yet been found beneath the ocean.
article_snippet.sent: At those depths the spherical microbes have to survive huge pressures that would crush most organisms while having no access to light or oxygen often needed for life.
article_snippet.sent: The findings have raised the prospect that life may still be clinging on deep underground on planets such as Mars, where there was once thought to be flowing water on the surface.
article_snippet.sent: Scientists have already speculated that the discovery of archae bacteria deep inside the Earth's crust has raised prospects of finding life on other planets.
article_snippet.sent: The findings suggest that life living beneath the ocean floor and in the cracks of rocks deep below the surface could be far more diverse than previously thought.
article_snippet.sent: It is thought that there may even be more biomass living inside the Earth than on the Earth surface.
article_snippet.sent: Matt Kane, program director for the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology, said: 'Life far beneath the Earth's subsurface is an enigma. '
article_snippet.sent: By probing deep into our planet, these scientists have discovered new information about Earth's microbes and how these scientists evolve.'