Life deep inside the Earth

How did life emerge? Does it exist beyond Earth? Researcher Cara Magnabosco is seeking answers – not on other planets, but deep underground. In a tunnel inside the Swiss Alps she finds microbes well adapted to subsurface conditions. Some have been living there for tens of thousands of years.

Magnabosco developed a passion for microbiology while attending high school in the US state of Indiana. Today, she’s an assistant professor for geobiology at the federal technology institute ETH Zurich. In her research work, she analyses the basic conditions necessary for life – and their limitations in terms of depth, pressure, and temperature.

Magnabosco will also work with the Center for the Origin and Prevalence of Life, which is set to open in autumn 2022 and to be run by Swiss Nobel Prize laureate Didier Queloz. The Zurich-based centre will involve research from very different fields, such as chemistry, biology, geosciences and astrophysics.

Should we find life on other planets, Magnabosco believes that it’s more likely to resemble microorganisms rather than complex beings. At least in our solar system, we know that the surfaces on most planets are uninhabitable. And from Earth, we know that more microorganisms live underground than on the surface or in the oceans.