14 DAY TRIAL // Recent investigations in the Antarctic have revealed a microbe colony that has been living underneath hundreds of feet of ice for 1.5 million years, after having been completely separated from the outside world. The microorganisms have no access to oxygen or sunlight, so they just had to make do with what they could find under the ice, which admittedly wasn't much. Then again, microbes and bacteria are known for their resilience to the harshest of conditions. The find could have implications for space exploration, as these organisms prove that they can live for millions of years without any apparent source of food or energy. The same situation could apply to Mars, Titan, or Enceladus.
LiveScience reports that the find was made in the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, a vast stretch of ice in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. A certain part of the sheet, the Taylor Glacier, exhibited a very peculiar trait, in that meltwater flowing out of it had a very strong red color. This occurrence rightfully earned the formation the name “Blood Falls.” Scientific studies on the location revealed the fact that the meltwater was laden with microbes that used sulfur compounds to extract iron from the bedrock below, hence the rusty color of the “Falls.”
“When I started running the chemical analysis on [the samples], there was no oxygen. That was when this got really interesting, it was a real 'eureka' moment,” Dartmouth College in New Hampshire researcher Jill Mikucki, who, at the time of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded study, was a Montana State University graduate student and a Harvard University postdoctoral researcher, explained. Preliminary investigations revealed that the briny pool in which the microbes lived, underneath the ice, was closed some 1.5 to 2 million years ago.
Digging the colony up is not an option, the researchers say, on account of the fact that the ice is simply too thick, and that the 3-mile (5-kilometer) -wide pool is too far at the back of the glacier. They estimate that the average temperature in the pool is of about 14 degrees Fahrenheit (minus ten degrees Celsius), but say that the stretch of water does not freeze over because it has a three-to-four-time larger salt concentration than the ice around it.
“It's a bit like finding a forest that nobody has seen for 1.5 million years. 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,” Harvard University expert Ann Pearson, who has also been a member of the study team, added. The organisms that were retrieved are similar in configuration to existing ones, which proves that they have a common ancestor.
The pool “is a unique sort of time capsule from a period in Earth's history. I don't know of another environment quite like this on Earth,” Mikucki explained. Further investigations could offer space explorers a hint of what to look for when exploring ice-covered plants and moons, such as Jupiter's Europa.