However, this isn't your garden variety "make everything bigger" microscope. We don't just take a sample in the same form it comes out of the ground. Instead, geologists make what we call "thin ...

The solid basalt rock is gray, the clay minerals are orange, and the bacterial cells are green spheres. Credit Suzuki et al. 2020, DOI: 10.1038/s42003-020-0860-1, CC BY 4.0 ...