A great helper from nature to assist the Kyoto Protocol in meeting its target has been discovered! They are the unsung assistants living humbly in the deep ocean! Yes, they are single celled organisms living at the vents of so-called mud volcanoes.
Attenuating the climate change triggering key greenhouse gas, these microbes gobble methane and are found around the Haakon Mosby mud volcano, south of the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen.
Hats off to Antje Boetius of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany and his Franco-German team, who discovered three communities of these single celled organisms — two are species called archaeons, one being new to science and the third is a bacterium that uses oxygen to break down methane.
