> Templeton is one of a growing number of scientists who believe that the Earth’s deep subsurface is brimming with life. By some estimates, this unexplored biosphere may contain anywhere from a tenth to one-half of all living matter on Earth.

I know the emphasis should be "some", but even then this is a lot of biomatter. How do they come to that number?

Volume vs. surface area. The life more familiar to us is concentrated to what amounts to a 2D surface. Oceans are mostly devoid of life excluding surface waters where sunlight is available and seabed ecosystems.

One of the first people to consider this was Thomas Gold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold), for example http://www.pnas.org/content/89/13/6045.

There's a nice review here (http://www.pnas.org/content/114/27/6895) but it doesn't have much detail.

There's a lot of space down there. From what we learn about life is that it will fill every available niche.

This long article finally gets to a useful point and explains how there could be life on the bodies in the Solar System. Microbes eating hydrogen could actually be viable on Mars and other places, just like they do "down in the crust" on Earth. There's actually no reason it couldn't work on many places.

> “This is beautiful rock,” said Templeton, running a latex-gloved finger over its surface. Her sunglasses were pushed back over her straight brown hair, revealing cheekbones darkened from years of working outside on ships, on tropical islands, in the high Arctic, and everywhere else her work has taken her.

What a bizarre section. Would the author ever write about a man like this?

Please don't single out the worst thing in an article to respond to, especially when it leads to a generic flamewar tangent. All those do is suck oxygen away from anything interesting and specific in the thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

From https://www.vqronline.org/reporting-articles/2016/03/antarct...

Duling, who has a bushy white beard, somber blue eyes, and thick hands calloused from decades of labor, hails from a family corn farm in central Nebraska. He led me on a tour of the drill—up and through and under, like walking through the belly of a carnival ride, pointing here and there to give a kind of genealogy of its parts. “That’s a dairy storage tank,” he said as he pointed toward a truck-sized cylinder overhead. “A stirring tank, like out of a cheese factory. I bought it used from Ullmer’s Dairy in Pulaski, Wisconsin.”

The answer is: yes.

> Would the author ever write about a man like this?

I would hope so.

She's a geobiologist. Most people are going to visualize a geobiologist as some pasty, probably fat, person in a lab coat with a microscope deep inside some fluorescent lighted big building doing boring things with rocks (the geo part) that are covered with moss, fungus, or animal shit (the bio part).

The article starts her out driving a "Land Cruiser across the bumpy, rock-strewn floor of Wadi Lawayni, a broad, arid valley that cuts through the mountains of Oman". So right off the bat, no lab and an exotic location in a general region of the world that is troubled.

Later, the section you quoted implie that this sort of thing is common for her. She doesn't just occasionally get out of the lab to far flung corners of the world. The visualization people have at this point is no longer "fat pasty lab kind of scientist".

The kind of scientist they are visualizing at that point is Indiana Jones.

Look at some of the other locations they describe her working at after the above description. Deep undersea. On a thin crust on top of an active lava flow. That expands on the scope implied by the physical description, cementing the image.

I always get a little annoyed when articles don't just get to the point (what are endoterrestrials and talking only about them) instead of making me feel like I'm reading a novel. Thanks to your post, though, now I think I understand that it's to appeal to a wider audience (wonder if it works), and maybe to get some more appreciation or admiration for the people involved.

>I always get a little annoyed when articles don't just get to the point (what are endoterrestrials and talking only about them) instead of making me feel like I'm reading a novel.

That's like 80% of US long form journalism. Everything has to fit into a storytelling narrative and reported like you're reading some biography.

> Would the author ever write about a man like this?

I think so. It's perfectly in the style of these crappy mass-produced long read articles, padded with every possible cliché and useless piece of information to sound like exciting stories. I'm sick of skimming through tons of padding text to extract the smallest nuggets of valuable information.

It's what happens when editors and publishers see the success of long-form journalism, but don't understand that the 'scenery' language is just there to really flavor a driving story.

So we get a 5 sentence story that gets turned into this mess.

There may be around 5 to 6 lines of interesting information in that article. Way too much crud!

I wish there was a service where you'd send a url of an article such as this one and it'd spit out a summary with only the relevant data and without all the surrounding cruft. Something like a tl;dr for this type of articles.

It's called an abstract, and it's a thing for scientific papers. If you want literally none of the human side of a story or discovery, research papers are a great solution and don't need to be recompiled from longform journalism.

If you want concise descriptions of science, read the papers or abstracts. Complaining about journalistic style will literally get you nowhere.

Edit: yes, please flag me because I upset you by providing helpful information. That's definitely not an abuse of power.

This is not just "journalistic style". It is a specific journalistic style of many possible ones; and I find it annoying in its repetitiveness. It might be fun to read an article like this the first or second time; by the third one you start to discern the pattern, and starts to realize that all the stuffing with pointless details and the rambling exposition are always the same. A writer can entertain his/ her readers with insightful remarks, wittiness, or great descriptive passages- but very little if none of these are to be found here: these articles show no particular talent, or focus, they all follow a very obvious scheme and sound as if they were all written by the same dull person. Come on, journalism can be much better than this.

I don't like it either.

Yet, we not liking it won't change anything. In general, the public like this stile, so journalists will write this way.

You are better searching for media that fits your stile better.

Do you mean that I shouldn't express or voice my dislike for things I don't like?

I'm just saying that it's useless, and you'll gain more by actually changing your habits than trying to change society.

But if you think it's a hill worth taking, go ahead. You won't succeed, but if all you want is to try, you'll get to try.

> Would the author ever write about a man like this?

I tried to check. On theatlantic (okay, I'm too lazy to search harder) there are two other articles by the same author; one is from 2014 (and has no women as major characters), and the other is from earlier this year (and has a woman as the main scientist). I didn't find any physical description of the people in either story. So... not enough evidence to really establish a clear pattern on this person.

Still, even without data, I've a strong suspicion (just from experience) this sort of text is more common when writing about women, and I agree it's bizarre.

>Would the author ever write about a man like this?

Sure. Describing their subject's look and personal characteristics, narrative style, is one of the most common tropes in long form reporting.

I don't see how that exact description couldn't be used when writing about a man. In fact I assumed it was a man at the start of the quote (haven't read the article yet).

I mean, yes, I guess it is entirely possible for male journalists use a science article to describe anyone's hair, cheekbones and face in a way that wouldn't sound out of place in a holiday novel. It's a possibility they seem to only explore for women though.

>I mean, yes, I guess it is entirely possible for male journalists use a science article to describe anyone's hair, cheekbones and face in a way that wouldn't sound out of place in a holiday novel

It's not only "possible", it's very common. The snark is not warranted. Almost all e.g. Wired profile stories do the same thing, male or female -- they only fail to add something in those lines when the subject is already known (e.g. Musk or Torvalds, so nobody needs to know how they look).

E.g.:

JAMES ALLISON LOOKS like a cross between Jerry Garcia and Ben Franklin, and he’s a bit of both, an iconoclastic scientist and musician known for good times and great achievements. He also doesn’t always answer his phone, especially when the call arrives at 5 am, from an unfamiliar number.

https://www.wired.com/story/meet-jim-allison-the-texan-who-j...