Scientists Melt Million-year-old Ice In Search Of Ancient Microbes

From Sciencedaily.com

Researchers from the University of Delaware and the University of California at Riverside have thawed ice estimated to be at least a million years old from above Lake Vostok, an ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica. The scientists will now examine the eons-old water for microorganisms, and try to figure out how they survived the ages in total darkness, in freezing cold and without food and energy from the sun. segments of ice were cut from an 11,866-foot ice core, 656 feet above the surface of Lake Vostok. This ice was once water in lake Vostok itself and froze to the bottom of the existing Antarctic ice sheet. No samples have been taken directly from lake Vostok as of yet due to fears of contaminating the area. Since the lake has not had direct contact with the surface world for at least 15 million years, this would be a contamination of one of the most pristine environments on Earth.

Night of the Living (micro) Dead

Multi-million year old mini-Corpsicles are coming alive again! Researchers believe they have isolated eight million year old bacteria from core samples taken within Antarctic glacial ice--and have revived them!

Frederik Pohl was the first to use the term corpsicle in his 1969 novel The Age of the Pussyfoot. The term--considered rather offensive by cryogenics supporters--combines 'corpse' with 'popsicle' a popular flavored ice treat, to describe human beings cryonically frozen in hopes that future human beings will be able to thaw them and bring them back to life. "Corpsicle" has since been used by other writers, including Robert Heinlein, Greg Bear, L. M. Bujold, Larry Niven and others.

The organisms that researcher Kay Bidle of Rutgers University revived are single-celled, (hence 'mini-corpsicles') In vitro, they reproduce slowly (about 1/10th the speed of younger microbes) due apparently to aeons of ionizing radiation whacking their genes. Our planet's melting icecaps are releasing enormous quantities of these and other species of ancient microbes back into circulation. But don't worry, they say, these are marine microbes, and not virulent toward land animals. Read New Scientist article

Wait a minute....most life on earth ARE marine organisms, and, were a certain thawed strain to prove lethal to certain marine algae (those producing most of the oxygen that we LAND animals breathe) we might be gasping not with wonder but with desperation.

Ron