Date Time Microbes buried at bottom of sea start flourishing after 80.000 years In otherwise energetic desserts at the bottom of the sea, researchers have found oases where microbes can harvest energy. Remarkably, the microbes first have to be buried under starving conditions for 80.000 years. An international group of researchers, amongst them José Mogollón from the Insitute of Environmental Sciences (CML) at Leiden University, has published this finding in PNAS. The researchers studied microbes from the genus Scalindua in the Greenland/Norwegian Sea. Microbes of this species were able to reactivate and increase their population size by more than 4 orders of magnitude long after burial.