After 40,000 Years in Ice, Microbes Are Coming Back to Life — Experts Think It’s a Warning Sign
Microbes and other tiny living organisms have extraordinary ways to survive even in extreme weather conditions. While some can live even without sunlight, others withstand extremely cold conditions underwater. These adaptations allow them to survive in places like volcanic vents, glaciers, deserts, and more. In one such recent discovery, researchers found that microbes living deep within the Alaskan permafrost for more than 40,000 years are now coming back to life as the rising global temperature in the region is causing the ice to melt. These ancient life forms were discovered inside an old military tunnel.
As the planet gets warmer with each passing day due to various reasons, including the growing use of fossil fuels, Arctic permafrost is also thawing, releasing the greenhouse gases that have remained trapped for several years. When this process takes place, tiny organisms, including those found in the researchers’ samples, reawaken and begin feeding on nearby decaying material. With this, harmful gases like methane and carbon dioxide are also released into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. These findings were revealed in a study titled, ‘Microbial Resuscitation and Growth Rates in Deep Permafrost: Lipid Stable Isotope Probing Results From the Permafrost Research Tunnel in Fox, Alaska.’ It was published by the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences.
The team collected the frozen samples from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Permafrost Tunnel, which stretches over 100 meters or 328 feet below the ground. In the laboratory, they warmed the samples, recreating the temperatures that might occur during an Alaskan summer, allowing the microbes to reactivate, as reported by Science Alert. At first, the microbes reproduced so slowly that only one in every 100,000 cells was replaced each day. But after about six months, the frozen microbes suddenly became lively. A popular microbiologist and one of the researchers of the study, Tristan Caro, spoke of this and said, "These are not dead samples by any means.”
He added, “They're still very much capable of hosting robust life that can break down organic matter and release it as carbon dioxide." Expressing concern, Caro also said, "You might have a single hot day in the Alaskan summer, but what matters much more is the lengthening of the summer season to where these warm temperatures extend into the autumn and spring.” Furthermore, Sebastian Kopf, a geomicrobiologist at CU Boulder, also said, "It's one of the biggest unknowns in climate responses. How will the thawing of all this frozen ground, where we know there's tons of carbon stored, affect the ecology of these regions and the rate of climate change?"
Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that Alaska isn't the only place where permafrost exists. Huge layers of frozen ground are also present in parts of northern Canada, Greenland, and Siberia. Not just this, even mountain regions such as the Tibetan Plateau hold patches of permafrost. Therefore, if permafrost in other parts of the world begins to thaw the way it has already begun in Alaska, the effects could be alarming. Global temperatures could rise even faster, creating a dangerous loop that could push the planet toward more extreme and unpredictable climate shifts.
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