Bacteria found thriving beneath Antarctic glacier

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Bacteria found thriving beneath Antarctic glacier

Randolph E. Schmid

WASHINGTON - Hidden in the bone-chilling dark beneath an Antarctic glacier, a

colony of strange bacteria is thriving.

Scientists investigating the flow of blood-red water from beneath the glacier

discovered the bacteria, which have survived for millions of years, living on

sulphur and iron compounds, they report in Friday's edition of the journal

Science.

" Among the big questions here are: 'How does an ecosystem function below

glaciers?', 'How are they able to persist below hundreds of metres of ice and

live in permanently cold and dark conditions for extended periods of time, in

the case of Blood Falls, over millions of years? " said lead researcher Jill

Mikucki of Harvard University.

Blood Falls, flowing from beneath Glacier, has long evoked curiosity

because of its colour. The researchers determined that iron compounds provide

the colour, and in the process of their research they discovered bacteria in the

water, an extremely salty pool.

Priscu, of Montana State University, said that because the ecosystem has

been isolated for so long in extreme conditions, it could help explain how life

might exist on other planets, and serve as a model for how life can exist under

ice.

The researchers believe the pool of water was trapped about 1.5 million years

ago when the glacier moved over a lake. It doesn't freeze because it is four

times saltier than the ocean.

The pool is so deep under the ice and so far back from the edge that the

researchers couldn't drill down to it, but they were able to collect some of the

outflow for testing.

" When I started running the chemical analysis on it, there was no oxygen, "

Mikucki said. " That was when this got really interesting, it was a real 'eureka'

moment. "

Most of the bacteria she found were descended from marine microorganisms - not

from those found on land - and they were able to live without the food and light

sources of the open ocean.

The researchers concluded that the ancestors of the bacteria probably lived in

the ocean millions of years ago and when the Antarctic valleys rose, a pool of

seawater was trapped and was eventually capped by the flow of the glacier.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Canadian Institute

for Advanced Research, Harvard Microbial Sciences Initiative and the National

Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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On the Net:

Science: http://www.sciencemag.org