Life Confirmed Under Antarctic Ice; Is Space Next?

Tomorrow’s edition of the journal Nature will include a paper documenting the existence of microorganisms living far beneath Antarctic ice.  Special drilling and extraction techniques allowed scientists to tap into an active ecosystem half a mile below the surface of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where life was found in a lake untouched by sunlight or wind for millions of years. The discovery raises the obvious question of what other extreme environments might be able to harbor life on our planet, or beyond.

A team led by Montana State University professor John Priscu brought up samples from below the ice that contained single-celled microbes called Archaea, which convert ammonium and methane into energy to survive and grow.

“We were able to prove unequivocally to the world that Antarctica is not a dead continent,” Priscu said in a release. Similar expeditions have found sub-ice environments teeming with bacteria in recent years, but questions have been raised about possible contamination in the drilling process. The paper’s lead author Brent Christner says with this latest effort, there is now clear proof.
“It’s the first definitive evidence that there’s not only life, but active ecosystems underneath the Antarctic ice sheet, something that we have been guessing about for decades. With this paper, we pound the table and say, ‘Yes, we were right.’”

The conditions below that Antarctic ice sheet have certain characteristics in common with known places on other worlds in our solar system, leading many to wonder if life might be more inevitable in those distant locales than previously thought.
Saturn’s moon Titan Titan, for example, is far colder than Earth, but plays host to vast lakes of liquid methane that could be a potential feast for hearty microbes similar to those living under the Antarctic ice sheet. Tidally-heated liquid oceans are also believed to exist beneath the icy shell of Jupiter’s moon Europa and other objects in our solar system.

 

Some of the graduate students working on the mission to retrieve microscopic life from beneath Antarctica reportedly joked that they may have reached an early peak in their scientific careers.
“Some of the graduate students joke, ‘How do we top this?’ We can’t,” said Montana State doctoral student Alex Michaud.

Perhaps not. At least, not if they continue to limit their research to this planet. NASA could launch a mission to explore Europa sometime in the 2020s.


Article and Photos Sourced From:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2014/08/20/life-confirmed-under-antarctic-ice-is-space-next/