Head Blaze

I strongly believe in the invention of nature and that the only reason we survive on this planet is solely based on what we have learned from the earth and the incredible collection of life here. This is an excellent example of a discovery that should make headlines but barely gets noticed. The key here is that no one believed that anything could have survived without oxygen. Surprise, they do live and have done so for 1.5 million years! There is a lot to be learned from the earth and we really do have an obligation to make sure we do not overlook anything, even microbes in a glacier.

A reservoir of briny liquid buried deep beneath an Antarctic glacier supports hardy microbes that have lived in isolation for millions of years, researchers report April 17 in the journal Science.

The discovery of life in a place where cold, darkness, and lack of oxygen would previously have led scientists to believe nothing could survive comes from a team led by researchers at Harvard University and Dartmouth College. Their work was funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and Harvard’s Microbial Sciences Initiative.

Despite their profound isolation, the microbes are remarkably similar to species found in modern marine environments, suggesting that the organisms now under the glacier are the remnants of a larger population that once occupied an open fjord or sea.

“It’s a bit like finding a forest that nobody has seen for 1.5 million years,” says Ann Pearson, Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Intriguingly, the species living there are similar to contemporary organisms, and yet quite different — a result, no doubt, of having lived in such an inhospitable environment for so long.”
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