Carl Zimmer

kind of like the ocean's own lungs, spraying up droplets, some of which have bacteria and viruses and other living things.

And those go up in the air.

The wind catches them and they blow around.

Some of them go very, very high, many, many miles.

Some of them go into the clouds.

And they do blow all over the place.

And so there is actually a...

Science is really starting to come into its own of studying the planetary-wide pattern of the flow of life, not just from oceans, but from the ground.

Things come out of the ground all of the time.

The soil is rich with microbes, and those are rising up.

Of course, plants, you know, we're familiar with plants having pollen, but plants themselves are also slathered in fungi and other organisms.

They shed those into the air as well.

And so you just have this tremendous swirl of life that how high it can go, nobody's quite sure.

They can certainly go up maybe 12 miles.

Some expeditions, rocket missions have claimed to find them 40 miles in the air.

It's not clear, but you know,

we're talking 10, 20, 30 miles up is where all this life gets.

So this is, so people call this the arrow biome and we're living in it.

It's like we're in an ocean and we're breathing in that ocean.

And so you are breathing in some of those organisms literally with every breath.