Extreme extremophiles: survivors on glaciers (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, May 29, 2023, 20:49 (333 days ago) @ David Turell

Come back to life in Spring melts:

https://www.sciencealert.com/glaciers-are-not-devoid-of-life-tons-of-microbes-hide-with...

"Glaciers in the Arctic are not nearly as devoid of life as they might appear at first sight.

"In fact, carpets of ice and snow in Greenland and Iceland are practically crawling with microscopic life forms.

"Like seasonal zombies, many of these organisms lie dormant in winter, waking from their frozen slumber only with the summer melt.

"'A small puddle of meltwater on a glacier can easily have 4,000 different species living in it," says microbiologist Alexandre Anesio from Aarhus University in Sweden.

"'They live on bacteria, algae, viruses, and microscopic fungi. It's a whole ecosystem that we never knew existed until recently."

"When researchers tested the ice and snow at two glaciers in the mid-to-late summer, one in Iceland and the other in Greenland, more than half the bacteria they found were active.

"The rest were dormant or dead.

"Within just a day of thawing, however, some of those dormant microbes regained the ability to read genes and produce amino acid building blocks – like the stiff cogs of a machine finally turning after six months of stillness.

"The findings suggest microbial communities on snow and ice can rapidly respond to changes in ice melt.

***

"'Crucially, our results suggest that glacial microorganisms are able to respond to short melt-events occurring on the timescale of hours to days – which is sufficiently short that periodic melting on glacier surfaces potentially impacts the functioning of glacial ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles," scientists write.

"'Enhanced winter warming is predicted to become more prevalent as a result of future climate change and could therefore bring about ecological changes to glaciers.'"

Comment: as usual extremophiles prove life can be anywhere it wants to be.