Hidden Beneath a Half Mile of Ice, Antarctic Lake Teems with Life
By Tom Metcalfe, Live Science Contributor | January 15, 2019 08:10am ET
The dark waters of a lake deep beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet and a few hundred miles from the South Pole are teeming with bacterial life, say scientists despite it being one of the most extreme environments on Earth.
The discovery has implications for the search for life on other planets in particular on the planet Mars, where signs of a buried lake of liquid saltwater were seen in data reported last year by the European Space Agency's orbiting Mars Express spacecraft.
Expedition leader John Priscu, a professor of polar ecology at the University of Montana, told Live Science in a telephone interview from Antarctica this week that early studies of water samples taken from Lake Mercer which is buried beneath a glacier showed that they contained approximately 10,000 bacterial cells per milliliter.
That's only about 1 percent of the 1 million microbial cells per milliliter typically found in the open ocean, but a very high level for a sunless body of water buried deep beneath an Antarctic glacier.
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