National Geographic goes looking for heat-loving bacteria in a very cold place

National Geographic “Life in an Icy Inferno”

This is an interesting article from the “great extents to which scientists go to do their work” perspective, but disappointingly it was not all that clear in this article what the purpose of finding thermophilic bacteria in Antarctica might be. I suppose that plenty of NatGeo expeditions can be rationalized with a brief “just because it was there”, but I have to imagine that there must be something particularly special about these bacteria to warrant such a trek.