Confirmed: Microbial life found half mile below Antarctic ice sheet

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Source: Los Angeles Times

In an icy lake half a mile beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, scientists have discovered a diverse ecosystem of single-celled organisms that have managed to survive without ever seeing the light of the sun.

The discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature is not so much a surprise as a triumph of science and engineering. The research team spent 10 years and more than $10 million to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that life did indeed exist in subglacial lakes near the South Pole.

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"I wasn't surprised to find life under there, but I was surprised how much life there was, and how they made a living," said Priscu, who teaches at Montana State University. "They are essentially eating the Earth."

Priscu and his team report the discovery of close to 4,000 species of microbes growing in the cold, dark environment of Subglacial Lake Whillans in western Antarctica. Each quarter teaspoon of the tea-colored lake water that they brought to the surface had about 130,000 cells in it, they write.

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The findings have major implications for the search for life outside of Earth, especially on the moons of Enceladus and Europa, where scientists believe a thick icy crust covers a vast, internal liquid ocean.

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Read more: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-microbe-ecosystem-antartic-ice-sheet-20140819-story.html

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1. Ecosystem found under Antarctic ice sheet raises hopes for alien life

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/11046608/Ecosystem-found-under-Antarctic-ice-sheet-raises-hopes-for-alien-life.html

Ecosystem found under Antarctic ice sheet raises hopes for alien life

Tiny rock-eating lifeforms have been discovered living half a mile beneath pack ice in Antarctica, raising the prospect that life could exist in similarly hostile environments such as Mars

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Similar microbes can be found in the deep oceans, but they rely on the remains of surface organisms, raining down from above, as energy sources.

In contrast, the environment under the glacier is so hostile that these new organisms are forced to ‘eat rock’, attaching themselves to mineral particles and harvesting tiny amounts of ammonium and nitrogen.

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2. Microbes Discovered in Subglacial Antarctic Lake May Hint at Life in Space

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/08/140820-antarctic-microbe-lake-astrobiology-science/

Microbes Discovered in Subglacial Antarctic Lake May Hint at Life in Space

Similar microbes discovered earlier were plagued by contamination controversy.

By Michael D. Lemonick for National Geographic
Published August 20, 2014

Biologists have extracted mineral-eating microbes from a lake buried a half mile below the surface of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, according to a new study published in Nature.

Earlier claims of similar microbes drawn from a different Antarctic lake, say the study's authors, were controversial because the samples had been contaminated—a problem eliminated in this case by especially careful drilling techniques.

"The report is a landmark for the polar sciences," writes Martyn Tranter, a geochemist at the University of Bristol, England, who was not involved in the study, in a commentary also published in Nature.

It's also a landmark in the science of astrobiology, the search for life on other worlds. In recent years, scientists have come to understand that life can thrive in a much wider range of environments than they once believed, including superheated water at the bottom of the ocean and ice caves in Greenland. That suggests that extraterrestrial life might also exist in places once thought uninhabitable.

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