Gravity corer, blue serpentine mud and mineralogy

50:35operation. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's ridiculous to like to like stuff that we know >> stuff that Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. >> So here's how they uh they um they got the sample. They have something called a gravity corer. >> Okay. It's a It's a It's a core. So, what they do is they they get like a 1.4 ton weighted steel pipe and they just shoot that down into the into the ocean floor and they grab like 2 m worth of >> soil. Yeah. >> In there, right? They bring it back up into the surface. Then they take the mud out. The mud h has this blue hue which is serpentine. Blue serpentine. Okay. There you can see. And the you can do

51:16minology on it. You can do X-ray defraction and thermal gravity and you can identify minerals like serpentine >> okay >> and brusite and things like that >> the pro and what you want to do is you want to find life there right >> the immediate thing that anyone would do it's like okay I want to find life what do I do I look for DNA >> easy yeah >> I look for DNA >> this thing has about 10 cells per cubic cm that's really low >> right low usually usually You got something like 10 to the 5 cells per cubic centimeter in soil. >> Okay. >> Okay. Soil has a ridiculous amount of cells, a ridiculous amount of DNA. >> This thing has only 10.

51:58>> So what's going to end up happening if you try doing something like PCA, which is polymerase chain reaction, it's basically a way to amplify DNA in your sample. So whatever little bit of DNA you have, you multiply it and then you try to, >> you know, put it through your measurements >> sticks and you try to figure out what the thing is. Um, if you try to do that, you only got 10 living cells. Most of the DNA that you're going to have is just going to be dead stuff that's conglomerated on the ocean floor. >> Right. >> Right. Because the the ocean has just raining dead material >> all the time. Yeah. >> All the time. Phytolanton, maybe a whale died somewhere. So, you're going to have

52:38all of this random DNA and not the actual DNA of the stuff living in there.