Jens Kallmeyer¹, André Friese¹, Kohen Witt Bauer², Sean Crowe³, Sulung Nomosatryo⁴, Verena Bernadette Heuer⁵, Clemens Glombitza⁶, Luis Ordonez⁷, Daniel Ariztegui⁷, Aurèle Vuillemin⁸, Rachel Simister⁹, Cynthia Henny¹⁰, Satria Bijaksana¹¹, Hendrik Vogel¹², Martin Melles¹³, James M Russell¹⁴ and ICDP Towuti Drilling Project Science Team, (1)Helmholtz Centre Potsdam GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany, (2)University of British Columbia, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Life Science Institute, Vancouver, BC, Canada, (3)University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, (4)GFZ Potsdam, Geomicrobiology, Potsdam, Germany, (5)University of Bremen, MARUM – Cen­ter for Ma­ri­ne En­vi­ron­men­tal Sci­en­ces, Bremen, Germany, (6)ETH Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, (7)University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland, (8)Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, Munich, Germany, (9)University of British Columbia, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Vancouver, BC, Canada, (10)Research Center for Limnology - Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Cibinong, Indonesia, (11)Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung, Indonesia, (12)University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland, (13)University of Cologne, Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, Cologne, Germany, (14)Brown University, Providence, RI, United States