Two microbes team up to munch methane

Vast stores of methane gas lie buried beneath the seafloor, yet little escapes from the sediments into the ocean and the atmosphere above. Geochemists have long suspected that methane-munching microbes gobble the gas before it can seep upward out of the ooze. But scientists had been at a loss to explain how a microorganism could consume methane where oxygen is in short supply, as it is in the sediments.