Nature celebrates the discovery of ancient life… not from the much-ballyhooed Lake Vostok project, but a smaller lake. Still frozen for a long, long time. And definitely home to life under the Antarctic ice:
Scientists drilling into the lake have found abundant and diverse bacteria. “Lake Vida is not a nice place to make a living in,” says Peter Doran, an Earth scientist from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the team that has been exploring the lake — the largest of a number of small bodies of water in the McMurdo Dry Valleys Antarctic desert. “It is quite remarkable that something wants to live in that cold, dark and salty environment at all.”
Doran and his colleagues have drilled into Lake Vida twice: once in 2005 and again in 2010.
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Genetic analysis suggests that most of the cells — both those of standard size and the microcells — are related to known types of bacterium. However, one abundant bacterium of normal size seems to have no close relatives among cultivated bacteria, and so may represent a new phylum.
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Isotope analysis of organic carbon particles in the ice suggests that the lake has been sealed for around 2,800 years, so any carbon in the brine must have been there for at least that long and there probably isn’t very much of it — suggesting that the microbes may be using something else to produce energy.
Because they are isolated and there are no predators in the lake, says [Alison Murray, a microbial environmentalist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada], the cells might have switched to a biologically reduced ‘survival mode’ — without cell division and reproduction — that allows them to endure stress and harsh environments for a long time.