Antarctic Moss, Entombed in Ice for 1,500 Years, Resurrected

Moss buried beneath Antarctic ice for more than 1,500 years has been revived by scientists, who report that the geological cold storage kept the mosses' vital material in the right shape to be brought back to life.

Scientists have been able to regenerate moss entombed beneath ice before, but never for specimens frozen for so long. The evidence provides exciting new insights into the survival of life on Earth, the scientists said.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and Reading University report that moss can come back to live and continue to grow after being buried in frozen permafrost for at least 1,530 years.

The discovery has deep implications, as mosses play key roles in ecosystems around the world; they are a major storer of fixed carbon, especially in northern regions.

"What mosses do in the ecosystem is far more important than we would generally realize when we look at a moss on a wall here for instance," said study co-author Peter Convey from the British Antarctic Survey. "Understanding what controls their growth and distribution, particularly in a fast-changing part of the world such as the Antarctic Peninsula region, is therefore of much wider significance."

Convey and his collaborators obtained moss from core samples of Antarctic permafrost. The moss would have already been at least a decade old when it was first frozen, the researchers said. After obtaining the moss core samples the researchers placed them in an incubator at normal growth temperature and light levels. It only took a few weeks for the moss to begin growing again, brought back to live after more than a millennium of deep freeze.

"This experiment shows that multi-cellular organisms, plants in this case, can survive over far longer timescales than previously thought. These mosses, a key part of the ecosystem, could survive century to millennial periods of ice advance, such as the Little Ice Age in Europe," Convey said.

"If they can survive in this way, then recolonization following an ice age, once the ice retreats, would be a lot easier than migrating trans-oceanic distances from warmer regions," he said. "It also maintains diversity in an area that would otherwise be wiped clean of life by the ice advance."

It is also possible, the researchers contend, that mosses could be regenerated from beyond 1,500 years ago.

"The potential clearly exists for much longer survival-although viability between successive interglacials would require a period of at least tens of thousands of years," the researchers contend. "Such a possibility provides an entirely new survival mechanism and a refugium for a major element of the polar terrestrial biota."