This annoyed me as well.

I finally unsubscribed this summer.

For me the last straw was a piece they did on Julian Assange when he was still going through his kangaroo court debacle in the UK, a pure hit job. It was gruesome stuff.

Yeah, beneath the planetary crust is asking a lot.

Probably didn't want to settle for less but you take what you can get . . .

We’ve known about tube worms for an awfully long time. If we found them in the mantle that actually would be worth a news article. This is middle school biology. And has been for decades.

The Economist's specialty is business and finance, not science. It's not out of the place for their journalists to make such mistakes, the same way many science publications make silly mistakes when talking about business matters.

Technically the article does say the young gestate farther into the vents, which is news. Not surprising news, but still news.

“Under the seabed” would have been more accurate.

> This is middle school biology. And has been for decades.

You have severely misunderstood the article.

It is not saying that there are tubeworms (and other animals) around deep sea vents. This, as you say, is well known.

It is saying that they also live underneath the sea bed in cracks in the rocks of the crust. This environment is even more extreme and brutal than in the open oceanic water. It is hotter, much lower in oxygen, and the chemical concentrations are even higher.

The organisms living within the rocks are even more extremophile than the ones in the oceanic water.

The greater point you are missing is that there is a whole other type of ecosystem that is less well known (and I think more recently discovered) than even vent colonies. The environment of organisms living in cracks and crevices of the rocks of the crust, far beneath the surface of the planet.

We've only drilled to ~12km down. The crust is up to 70km thick, comparable to the thickness of the atmosphere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole

The point here is that much of that very large volume is inhabited, by organisms that have been down there for a very long time. Not just millions but billions of years.

Billions-of-year-old rocks contain living organisms:

https://www.discoverwildlife.com/environment/living-microbes...

This is a vast and almost unknown ecological niche, the deep biosphere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_biosphere

And now, as the very top part of it at the bottom of the ocean is explored, it has metazoans in it too. Multicellular life, animals, as well as protozoan.

There are some people who believe that undersea cave systems may be orders of magnitude larger and especially wider, than we think they are. I tend to agree.