Slow Life

Life has a very broad spectrum of speeds. While we associate plants and even faster creatures such as corals with something still and immobile, particular lifeforms would be hard to even perceive as living objects at all. Kilometers underground, under ocean floor, in ice, and in permafrost metabolic rates of organisms are dramatically slower than on the surface. A simple event such as a cell division can happen over several millennia in those habitats. To our perception such life is literally indistinguishable from rock.

Daniel Stoupin.