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from the frozen-tardigrades-are-ice-bears dept.
EXCLUSIVE: Tiny animal carcasses found in buried Antarctic lake
Scientists drilling into a buried Antarctic lake 600 kilometres from the South Pole have found surprising signs of ancient life: the carcasses of tiny animals preserved under a kilometre of ice.
The crustaceans and a tardigrade, or 'water bear' — all smaller than poppy seeds — were found in Subglacial Lake Mercer, a body of water that had lain undisturbed for thousands of years. Until now, humans had seen the lake only indirectly, through ice-penetrating radar and other remote-sensing techniques. But that changed on 26 December when researchers funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) succeeded in melting a narrow portal through the ice to the water below.
Discovering the animals there was "fully unexpected", says David Harwood, a micro-palaeontologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who is part of the expedition — known as SALSA (Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access).
[...] The researchers now think that the creatures inhabited ponds and streams in the Transantarctic Mountains, roughly 50 kilometres from Lake Mercer, during brief warm periods in which the glaciers receded — either in the past 10,000 years, or 120,000 years ago. Later, as the climate cooled, ice smothered these oases of animal life. How the crustaceans and tardigrade reached Lake Mercer is still a matter of debate. Answers could come as the SALSA team tries to determine the age of the material using carbon dating and attempts to sequence the creatures' DNA. Piecing together that history could reveal more about when, and how far, Antarctica's glaciers retreated millennia ago.
Also at The Guardian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 19 2019, @07:07PM (1 child)
as we know it....as in, life as we know it gets increasingly implausible the closer you get to the planet's core.
There's always the fun possibility that there are extremophiles lurking out/down there with radically different 'biochemistry' to ours, there was plenty of time during the Hadean and Archean for chemical reactions to take place in the extreme conditions back then which potentially could have lead to life arising and evolving based on an exotic biochemistry capable of surviving the (to us) hostile environment present on the surface of the planet at the time.
It's only a minor logical step to posit that these lifeforms would then retreat to the more hospitable (to them) 'depths' of the planet as the Hadean segued into the Archean and the conditions on the surface of the planet became increasingly inimical to them..and that they (or their descendants) are still there.
Or, there's only aliens/Lemurians/Vril-ya/Nazis as you get closer to the core...as any fule kno the planet is hollow and populated..
I'm conflicted here, what would I rather have..exotic extremophiles or Nazis riding on the backs of Tyrannosaurus Rex [youtube.com]?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday January 21 2019, @02:21AM
True - but once you get deep enough that you can't find solid stone anymore, I'm willing to bet that nothing carbon-based can exist. Now if some sort of non-organic life arose independently in that inferno environment it would be deeply fascinating to study, but I'm not holding my breath.
Though hey - the implications of finding life from two independent origins on the same planet, in such wildly different environments, would be profound. Probably enough to make "hosts life" be the default assumption for most planets.