Confirmed: Microbial life found half mile below Antarctic ice sheet
Reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, 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 brought to the surface had about 130,000 cells in it.
In the lightless environment of Subglacial Lake Whillans, the microbes rely on minerals from the bedrock and sediments. The pressure of the slowly moving ice above the lake grinds the underlying rock into a powder, liberating the minerals in the rock into the water, and making them accessible to the microorganisms living there. The microbes act on those iron, ammonium and sulphide compounds to create energy.
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-microbe-ecosystem-antartic-ice-sheet-20140819-story.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Whillans
[Submissions will be much slower and intermittent now, after exhausting my backlog]
In the lightless environment of Subglacial Lake Whillans, the microbes rely on minerals from the bedrock and sediments. The pressure of the slowly moving ice above the lake grinds the underlying rock into a powder, liberating the minerals in the rock into the water, and making them accessible to the microorganisms living there. The microbes act on those iron, ammonium and sulphide compounds to create energy.
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-microbe-ecosystem-antartic-ice-sheet-20140819-story.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Whillans
[Submissions will be much slower and intermittent now, after exhausting my backlog]