Like Han Solo in frozen in carbonite, bacteria entombed in Earth’s polar ice sheets can live in a sort of suspended animation. The difference is the bacteria can persist this way for hundreds of thousands of years. And now, with the ice melting at unprecedented rates, they are poised to re-enter the ecological scene, eliciting new worries about the effects of global warming.
Extreme not only in age but also in number, the biomass of bacteria and other microbes beneath the ice sheets may be “more than 1,000 times that of all the humans on Earth,” freelance writer Cheryl Katz reported this week in The Daily Climate and in Scientific American.
"It's a way of recycling genomes," Montana Sate University microbiologist John Priscu told Katz. "You put something on the surface of the ice and a million years later it comes back out."
It’s that “coming back out” part we should hope the scientists keep an eye on. They have already managed to revive creatures that last lived long before humans walked the planet: Louisiana State University microbiologist Brent Christner revived bugs encased in 750,000-year-old ice.
Older still may be the microbes that other research teams may soon encounter as they drill into subglacial lakes Vostok and Ellsworth, two bodies of water that sit beneath a mile or more of Antarctic ice and have been sealed off from the outer world for millions of years.
Read More: http://news.discovery.com/earth/extreme-life-thawing-ice-revives-ancient-bugs-120419.html
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