So the oceans are certainly “the largest reservoir of life on Earth”. That number is literally beyond astronomical: it’s around ten thousand times the number of stars in the observable Universe. Although that concentration drops off to perhaps 10,000 microbes per millilitre in most of the deep ocean, the total global population of microbes in the oceans is staggering: about 44 octillion living cells (or 44,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 if you prefer). Rich Carey / shutterstockĪ single millilitre of surface seawater naturally contains around a million living bacteria and other kinds of single-celled microbes. So it may be wrong to assume a layer 8km high for the aerial habitat of animal life around the world, as there are few mountains rising to those heights. What about the aerial habitat for birds, bats, flying insects, and tiny animals? Bar-headed geese may fly at an altitude of more than 8km in the Himalayas, but they don’t actually fly 8km above the ground – they follow the terrain of the mountain range as they migrate over it. Only around 0.4% of our atmosphere is water vapour, so the aerial habitat for microbial life is much smaller than we might think. But before we imagine a layer 12km high for microbial life in the skies, it’s worth remembering that they need a watery environment in which to thrive. There are also microbes in atmosphere above our heads, living in water droplets and on ice crystals in thunderclouds, up to an altitude of at least 12km. That’s smaller than the oceans, and furthermore not all that volume is habitable, as the microbes are squeezed into spaces within the rocks. The depth limit for such subterranean life depends on local geology, however, and even assuming a limit of 2.5km all around the world gives us a “subsurface biosphere” of around 1,275m km³. There are microbes living 2.5km below the ocean floor, for example, in coal-bearing sediments. These trench-dwellers are not the deepest lifeforms on our planet, however, as a “subsurface biosphere” of microbes permeates even further into the Earth’s crust. Weird and wonderful creatures at the bottom of the ocean.
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And there is life swimming or drifting throughout that vast volume, even to the bottom of the deepest trenches nearly 11km beneath the waves.
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The average depth of the ocean is 3,682 metres, so taking 71% of the Earth’s surface with that average depth gives us an estimated volume of 1,332 million km³ for the oceans. But what about lifeforms that aren’t confined to dry ground or the seabed, those that can swim, fly, drift in wind or currents, or even thrive below the planet’s surface? The oceans cover 71% of the surface of the Earth, so seafloor provides the largest area for those species that move about on or are rooted to our planet’s surface – a reasonable justification for the “largest habitat on Earth”. And lines like that in the prequel can certainly be a head-scratcher for academics like us who fact-check these programmes. Over the past two years I’ve been a scientific adviser on some of the topics covered in a couple of episodes, while colleagues at the Open University have been academic partners for the whole series. “The ocean: the largest habitat on Earth” – those words, spoken by Sir David Attenborough at the start of the “prequel” to Blue Planet II, capture the scope, focus, and justification for the BBC Natural History Unit’s latest landmark series.