"It's a great study and an incredible achievement to have been able to do this," he says of the project, dubbed the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling. He did not take part in the work in Antarctica leading to the discovery. Sharp, a pioneer in uncovering biological activity beneath glaciers. "That becomes a much more realistic possibility given this finding," says Dr. Molecule for molecule, methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than the more abundant atmospheric carbon dioxide. "Potentially, that methane could be released to the atmosphere" as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreats with global warming, says Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. The idea that microbes could be lurking beneath them "has more traction now," he wrote in a commentary in Nature tied to the new results.Īs for Earth's climate, researchers have speculated that if microbial communities can thrive under the ice sheet, they could be contributing to the buildup of large reservoirs of methane beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in the organic-rich sediments of ancient coastal wetlands and marine basins. The results from Antarctica will only bolster their case.Įven Mars' stock as a potential host for extant life may have risen, suggests Martyn Trantor, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol in Britain. Both moons have oceans underneath their ice crusts. The activity of these communities in Antarctica bears on at least two other issues as well: global climate and the prospects for finding life on Jupiter's moon Europa, Saturn's moon Enceladus, or even on Mars, other researchers add.Īstrobiologists have looked at Enceladus and Europa as prime candidates for hosting at least microbial life. Yet through their internal chemical reactions, these organisms "are doing things like liberating nutrients from rock material, which can influence productivity in the world's oceans." We know very little about the chemical and biological activities that are going on in that sub-ice environment," she says. "About 10 percent of the Earth's terrestrial surface is covered by ice. Indeed, they are a poorly understood part of the global biogeochemical cycle, she suggests. In Ohio, one man’s quest to get more voters to agree to disagree These organisms "are active they have a function," says Jill Mikucki, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and a member of the international team reporting the discovery in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. But "could" is not the same as "does." It's a difference with important implications. The discovery confirms a long-standing expectation that life could thrive in this type of extreme environment. In essence, the community is a frosty variation on the microbial communities that form the bottom of the food chain around hydrothermal vents in the lightless depths of the ocean floor. Genetic evidence extracted from samples of lake water indicates that the lake teems with a wide variety of microbes that make up a complete food chain, with those at the bottom drawing their energy from chemicals in rocks and sediment in the lake bed. Researchers have uncovered a thriving community of microbes in a lake some 2,600 feet below the surface of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the first direct evidence of life in such lakes and the first window on the ecosystem the microbes occupy.
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