Antarctica's Blood Falls

[n2doc]

No, it's not "The Thing" (that might surface later....): this blood-red stain at the snout of Taylor Glacier in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica -one of the planet's most extreme deserts- is the by-product of unique microbes thriving in a briny 1.5 million-yea-old ocean-like reservoir beneath the glacier.
The ancient pond, whatever its size "is a unique sort of time capsule from a period in Earth's history," said Jill Mikucki, a National Science Foundation-funded researcher at Dartmouth College. . "I don't know of another environment quite like this on Earth."

Life below the Taylor Glacier may help scientist address questions about life on "Snowball Earth", the period of geological time when large ice sheets covered the Earth's surface, as well as serving as a living laboratory for studying life in other hostile environments, including the subglacial lakes of Antarctica and perhaps even on other icy planets in the solar system such as below the Martian ice caps or in the ice-covered oceans of Jupiter's moon Europa.
This unmapped reservoir of liquid chemically similar to sea water, but hidden under an inland Antarctic glacier, appears to support microbial life in a cold, dark, oxygen-poor environment – a most unexpected prehistoric biological lab teeming with life. Since their capture millennia ago, the microbes seem to have been completely isolated, hidden Under 400 meters of ice, they catch no sunlight, required for photosynthesis, and have no source of outside food, causing researchers to wonder how organisms found below the glacier could survive.
The only thing keeping the microbes alive, a new study says, is their ability to generate energy from chemical reactions with sulfur and iron.

more:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/10/what-did-they-find-15-millionyearold-bio-lab-unsealed-by-melting-antarctica-glacier-a-galaxy-insight.html#more

[TwilightGardener]

1. Cool.

[MineralMan]

2. Life wants to live...

[BadgerKid]

5. I've called it "life finds a way"

Nice.

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. The Melting Glaciers will release a lot of ancient surprises..

Where's Steve McQueen when you need him?



http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_GyctYAGxLRw/SKc_lx6IS7I/AAAAAAAAAV4/j758nuBUsmo/s320/the+blob+sci+fi+movie.jpg




I think the scientific value of this discovery will be important.

[Vinnie From Indy]

4. I observed a red algae looking substance on snow at high altitude

It is hard to see unless you are right on top of it. I wonder if this is a cousin to the Antarctic red colored microbes. Maybe what I saw in the high Sierras is the same life form carried by the winds from Antarctica after being released from it's icy prison. (que the scary music)

Who knows? Maybe there is a long dormant life form that will be released or awaken as the Earth's ice melts.

[Ichingcarpenter]

6. The Fungus that ate the world millions of years ago

The Fungus That Ate the World

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
1 October 2009

Scientists claim they have identified an ancient fungus that flourished about 250 million years ago, feeding on dead trees as it spread across the planet. Those remains could provide a crucial clue to the identity of what killed off much of Earth's plant and animal life at the time, although some researchers remain skeptical.
Earth's history is marked by several mass extinctions. Probably the best-known of these is at the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, about 65 million years ago, the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs and many other terrestrial and marine species. All over the world, samples of the sediments that were deposited then show traces of iridium, an element that is rare on Earth but common in asteroids, pointing to a massive impact.

A more mysterious mass extinction happened about 250 million years ago, marking the end of the Permian period and the beginning of the Triassic. Almost all marine life vanished, as did nearly three-quarters of land animals--almost all of which resided on a single, giant continent known as Pangaea. But the cause of the extinctions has remained elusive. There's no evidence of an impact, only scattered signs of lava flows and hints of possible sea-level rise or changes in ocean circulation.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1001/2