Confirmed: Microbial Life Found Half Mile Below Antarctic Ice Sheet

I wasn’t surprised to find life under there, but I was surprised how much life there was, and how they made a living. They are essentially eating the Earth.
– John Priscu, lead scientist

Scientists present definitive proof that life exists .5 miles beneath the ice sheet in the Antarctic lake. Pictured here, a coccoid shaped microbial cell with an attached sediment particle from the Subglacial Lake Whillans water column
Scientists present definitive proof that life exists .5 miles beneath the ice sheet in the Antarctic lake. Pictured here, a coccoid shaped microbial cell with an attached sediment particle from the Subglacial Lake Whillans water column

Confirmed: Microbial life found half mile below Antarctic ice sheet (Los Angeles Times, Aug 20, 2014):

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.

“It’s the real deal,” said Peter Doran, an Earth scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who was not involved in the study. “There was news that they found life early this year, but a bunch of us were waiting for the peer reviewed paper to come out before we jumped for joy.”

John Priscu, the lead scientist on the project, has been studying the Antarctic for 30 years. He published his first paper describing how life might exist in the extreme environment beneath the ice sheet in 1999, and has been looking for definitive proof ever since.

In the winter of 2013-2014, he finally got his chance. After spending millions on a drill that could bore a clean hole free of contaminants through the ice sheet, and moving more than 1 million pounds of gear on giant sleds across the Antarctic ice sheet, he and his team had just four frenzied days to collect the water samples that would prove whether his theories were right or wrong.

Before claiming victory, he wanted to see three lines of evidence that life did exist in the underwater lake. He wanted to visually see the cells under a microscope, he wanted to prove they were alive by feeding them organic matter and measuring their respiration rate, and he wanted to see how much ATT was in their cells.

“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.

1 thought on “Confirmed: Microbial Life Found Half Mile Below Antarctic Ice Sheet”

  1. Not surprising. They have found microbial life in scalding hot water as well. Life can survive in many environment…..just not the human or animal varieties……we can only handle cold and heat to a certain level, and we are wiped out. Same with oxygen, we require a great deal of it. If it is wiped out (Pacific Ocean that provided 50% of the world’s oxygen is now dead), we die.

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