Many strange environments on Earth remain to be explored.
Lake Vostok two kilometers under the Antarctic icecap resembles conditions inside the ice moons Europa and Enceladus.
The Marianna Trench and other sub-oceanic tectonic zones boast fumaroles and undersea geysers hosting sunless ecosystems.
High altitude drones have recovered unique bacteria from the stratosphere.
A fungal supercolony can slowly modify the soil of an entire region.

Then there are the Hot Caves.
Life exists much deeper than we had thought possible.
We now know bacterial ecosystems are thriving ten kilometers under our feet. Viruses and prions have exploited and hardened their hosts for billions of years, enough time for evolution to work miracles. Many entities have become heat-adapted to such a degree they couldn't exist on the surface.
The first hint of even deeper life was the discovery of 'volcano seeds' in the Kamchatka Peninsula. The next discovery was made in Japan last year.

'Iron Bugs', if they're alive at all, contain no DNA.
Concealed under every country on Earth, forming a significant fraction of the earth's mantle, they outweigh all conventional organisms by a factor of ten.
They thrive in the mysterious interface between chemistry and physics, constantly melting and solidifying the surrounding magma. We even found second and third degree 'offspring' in ancient granite, evidence of sexual selection. Mostly they reproduce by fission.

Individually, they appear to be harmless, but their fluid properties allow pseudogenetic adaptations and diseases to spread rapidly.
They have evolved seismic signals to warn each other of threats, and to rapidly crystallize cellular barriers, the so-called 'Hotcicles'.
They can change their dynamic states almost simultaneously, the first step toward a rudimentary society.
There are enough Iron Bugs to temporarily modify the whole upper mantle and crust. Oscillating several times per second, they could set up harmonic vibrations that would inevitably tend to focus on one spot.
And that explains what happened to Chicago last week.



The most important SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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