From the University of Alberta, this news release is making the rounds, but what many of the alarmists don’t get (Joe Romm for example) is that these plants had to have a warm environment to grow in first, then they were covered by ice, emerging again after the LIA ended. Many reports are only looking at the current emergence in a warmer period as if it is unique. – Anthony
400-year-old plants reawaken as glaciers recede
UAlberta researcher discovers plants exposed by retreating glaciers regrowing after centuries entombed under ice.
(Edmonton) When Catherine La Farge threads her way through the recently exposed terrain left behind by retreating glaciers, she looks at the ancient plant remains a lot closer than most. Now, her careful scrutiny has revealed a startling reawakening of long-dormant plants known as bryophytes.
La Farge, a researcher in the Faculty of Science, and director and curator of the Cryptogamic Herbarium at the University of Alberta, has overturned a long-held assumption that all of the plant remains exposed by retreating polar glaciers are dead. Previously, any new growth of plants close to the glacier margin was considered the result of rapid colonization by modern plants surrounding the glacier.
Using radiocarbon dating, La Farge and her co-authors confirmed that the plants, which ranged from 400 to 600 years old, were entombed during the Little Ice Age that happened between 1550 and 1850. In the field, La Farge noticed that the subglacial populations were not only intact, but also in pristine condition—with some suggesting regrowth.
In the lab, La Farge and her master’s student Krista Williams selected 24 subglacial samples for culture experiments. Seven of these samples produced 11 cultures that successfully regenerated four species from the original parent material.
La Farge says the regrowth of these Little Ice Age bryophytes (such as mosses and liverworts) expands our understanding of glacier ecosystems as biological reservoirs that are becoming increasingly important with global ice retreat. “We know that bryophytes can remain dormant for many years (for example, in deserts) and then are reactivated, but nobody expected them to rejuvenate after nearly 400 years beneath a glacier.
“These simple, efficient plants, which have been around for more than 400 million years, have evolved a unique biology for optimal resilience,” she adds. “Any bryophyte cell can reprogram itself to initiate the development of an entire new plant. This is equivalent to stem cells in faunal systems.”
La Farge says the finding amplifies the critical role of bryophytes in polar environments and has implications for all permafrost regions of the globe.
“Bryophytes are extremophiles that can thrive where other plants don’t, hence they play a vital role in the establishment, colonization and maintenance of polar ecosystems. This discovery emphasizes the importance of research that helps us understand the natural world, given how little we still know about polar ecosystems—with applied spinoffs for understanding reclamation that we may never have anticipated.”
The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Regeneration of Little Ice Age bryophytes emerging from a polar glacier with implications of totipotency in extreme environments,” by Catherine La Farge, Krista H. Williams, and John H. England. PNAS, 2013. To be available at www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1304199110
Abstract
Across the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, widespread ice retreat during the 20th century has sharply accelerated since 2004. In Sverdrup Pass, central Ellesmere Island, rapid glacier retreat is exposing intact plant communities whose radiocarbon dates demonstrate entombment during the Little Ice Age (1550–1850 AD). The exhumed bryophyte assemblages have exceptional structural integrity (i.e., setae, stem structures, leaf hair points) and have remarkable species richness (60 of 144 extant taxa in Sverdrup Pass). Although the populations are often discolored (blackened), some have developed green stem apices or lateral branches suggesting in vivo regrowth. To test their biological viability, Little Ice Age populations emerging from the ice margin were collected for in vitro growth experiments. Our results include a unique successful regeneration of subglacial bryophytes following 400 y of ice entombment. This finding demonstrates the totipotent capacity of bryophytes, the ability of a cell to dedifferentiate into a meristematic state (analogous to stem cells) and develop a new plant. In polar ecosystems, regrowth of bryophyte tissue buried by ice for 400 y significantly expands our understanding of their role in recolonization of polar landscapes (past or present). Regeneration of subglacial bryophytes broadens the concept of Ice Age refugia, traditionally confined to survival of land plants to sites above and beyond glacier margins. Our results emphasize the unrecognized resilience of bryophytes, which are commonly overlooked vis-a-vis their contribution to the establishment, colonization, and maintenance of polar terrestrial ecosystems.
This is wonderful.
I deeply enjoy confounding believers, by pointing out the permanent Viking settlements in Greenland over a 500+ year duration from 900 A.D. to 1400 A.D., roughly coinciding with the MWP.
The “believers” don’t believe me, but after a bit of Googling, they have no answer!
Good times, good times!
Zombie plants! We’re doomed!
This article is refreshing and wonderful to read, both for its content (resilient plants) and for its attention and loyalty to real science, using actual data and real living things to demonstrate a believable and logical chain of reasoning. I like it.
This is just one more bit of evidence that we are only now returning to the temperatures experienced sevaral hundred years ago. It’s curious indeed that the alarmists do not see that this is a pretty damning piece of evidence against their ’cause’.
Long may they hype it.
They took a 400 year nap under the ice. The ice FINALLY melted and now they woke up. Is this what GLOBAL CLIMATE DISASTER looks like? Some moss is finally thawing and half the world’s panties are in a bunch? Wow.
Unfortunately for the alarmists, life is virtually unbeatable.
So I presume this is Darwin’s survival of the fittest in action. Plants living on the margins of ice sheets having the ability to “hibernate” for at least 400 years have an advantage as the planet warms and cools, warms and cools through the ages. Not be able to make a hockey stick out of them though.
So the ice retreats, and immediately life appears to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. Too much CO2 gets removed, and the ice grows back. Or at least, that would be one conclusion if one believed that CO2 was controlling temperature. Seems that conclusion would break down if one was to consider why it there was so much CO2 in the atmosphere 400-600 years ago…
And yes, I am also amused by people who think we know everything being confounded by a new discovery.
Think how much a clever advertising campaign could sell cuttings from these plants for!
No need to apply for a grant again… 🙂
So from the bryophyte perspective, is global warming a good thing?
The main point of this excellent piece of research, is as Anthony says, the climate must have been warmer than the current period for the plants to have grown and become buried in the first place, which supports the MWP, This is a damning piece of evidence against the alarmists cause.
Regards
Keith Gordon
Yep – life finds a way.
Reminds me of cannabis plants coming up on reclamation schemes involving old coal mines. No it wasn’t the local hippies hitching a ride. Bird seed from the genuine canaries in the coal mine, brought to the surface out of a stinking (and often slow-burning) sulfurous mess, where they had been since before the invention of the miner’s safety lamp. (1832 or thereabouts?).
oebele bruinsma says:
May 31, 2013 at 2:19 am
Unfortunately for the alarmists, life is virtually unbeatable.
******************************
And perhaps “unbearable” in the coming year or two with them having to eat humble pie over their ludicrous predictions.
Meanwhile on the opposite side of the planet, microbes isolated inside a natural time capsule reappear after 2,000,000 years.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/blood-falls
So this unprecedented warmth is returning Ellesmere to the way it was half a millennium ago.
Apparently the present crisis isn’t the first time the polar bears were doomed.
400-year-old plants reawaken as glaciers recede
So four hundred years ago these plants were not covered by glaciers. Then they were covered by glaciers. Now they are not covered by glaciers again.
Hockey is overrated. So are tree thermometers.
This is not news: you can store any seed you like frozen in ice in your food freezer. Then you can sow it again next year, the year after and germinate it.
I used to store bacterial strains carrying recombinant DNA at -70C and mammalian cells under liquid nitrogen (considerably colder) – they were viable for years.
Seeds are designed to protect genetic material from temperature stress: that’s their purpose.
Why are we getting all excited about a fundamental mechanism that living species have developed to survive climate variations???
Can we try this with warmists?
Don’t let Mann get a hold of any trees – he will use them to prove that we had no weather for the past 400 years, until AGW kicked in over the last 30 years.
@rtj1211: 2 Questions:
1 – How do bryophytes make seeds?
2 – Was your recombinant DNA in the liquid N for 400 years or just a few years at a time? Not sure I know of any freezing experiments where a 400year time frame can be used.
Doh! Yoo arr sow cleva hey.
rtj1211 says:
May 31, 2013 at 3:50 am
…..
Why are we getting all excited about a fundamental mechanism that living species have developed to survive climate variations???
Because it shows that 400 years ago the climate was warm enough for these plants to grow naturally. This is the falsification of the shaft of the ‘hockey stick’ – the current warming is NOT unprecedented and there is literally ‘living proof’.
It won’t make any IPCC reports though as that would require integrity and ethics..
…so, it was warmer
Who’d a thunk it
hilarious
The interesting (to me) aspect of these reports of subglacial bryophytes is that it is now obvious that there are possibly sub-glacial plant fragments buried under the upper reaches of a glacier or an ice cap somewhere that are only refrigerated, not yet dead, and that there are living individuals that pre-date the Younger Dryas (12,800 years BP) – making them the oldest living non-clonal organisms (not seeds, fruit, or spores) on Earth.
I read somewhere that there are Roman ruins being exposed high in the alps just recently from retreating ice. The ice mustn’t have been there when they were built.
And there is also ‘Oszte’, the Iceman found near the border of Austria and Italy, the conclusion of the first investigators was that he hadn’t been exposed from the ice since he died ~4000 years ago, until the 1990s. This was before the Great Global Warming Scare of the 1990s-2010s, so perhaps they have now changed their mind.
Its WorseThan We Thought. Now zombie plants
But the glaciologists at LaFarge’s university don’t seem to have gotten her message.
http://www.science.ualberta.ca/Meltdown.aspx
This reminds me of a similar thing where retreating glaciers (in the Alps, I think) exposed an old silver mine from centuries ago – and all that was said of it was the global warming nonsense – no journalist understood the larger significance of it. Another one (more subtle) had to do with some of the drought in Saskatchewan several years ago, showing some fence posts that previously had been in a water-filled slough, but were ‘for the first time’ now exposed – how do they think the fence got built in the first place?
So which is more desirable, bryophytes or ice?
I’m having trouble squaring this quote:
“La Farge says the finding amplifies the critical role of bryophytes in polar environments and has implications for all permafrost regions of the globe.”
With this one:
“Previously, any new growth of plants close to the glacier margin was considered the result of rapid colonization by modern plants surrounding the glacier.”
If newly exposed ground is rapidly colonized by modern plants, why would bryophyte regeneration be “critical?” It obviously isn’t for barren ground succession.
I posted this on my Facebook page, and I can almost guarantee what the warmists in my family (including a PhD Oceanographer) are going to say. Since they can no longer claim that we’ve never been this warm in the history of the world, the new claim is that it has never warmed this fast before.
Sigh.
This year we had significant snow fall in Northern New England and NY over Memorial Day weekend. If we start getting snow in early June, I wonder how they’re going to reconcile that with AGW?
The little ice age reburied the pass over the Alps that Hannibal used when he crossed with his elephants. (Most of the poor elephants succumbed to pneumonia.) My understanding is that ice recently melted, revealing a Roman soldier laying with his armor slightly flattened, holding a placard which stated, in Latin, “Stop Global Warming.” Like the moss in Alberta, he was still alive, and after being revived with a glass of wine, he stated he has changed his mind and become a skeptic. (/sarc)
How can that be ? 400 year old plants under ice… There was no Mediaeval warm period so they must have put them there – yeah, that’s it – the the deniers put them there when the scientists weren’t looking in some sort of attempt to prove the MWP did exist and it was at least as warm then.
rtj1211 says:
May 31, 2013 at 3:50 am
“This is not news…”
_______________________
So, what You had to say is news?
Sheesh, if anyone missed the whole point… the newsy part is that this is yet more proof of the cyclic nature of climate on planet Earth.
What? Real science and inquiring minds?
The Alarmists and Bedwetters Inc, will of course insist, that history did not happen.
These plants were planted….
For something the chosen ones can really get their nickers twisted over;
Drill core samples of the Arctic Barren lands muskeg, contain mosquito larva dating from the era of Wooly Mammoths. These larva start wriggling as the split cores thaw in the sunlight.
The horror, swarms of mosquitos bred to draw blood through mammoth hide.
The uncovering of “X” years old plants by retreating glaciers is indeed incontrovertible evidence that it is warmer now than it has been for “X” years.
However it is not much used by alarmists due to an inherent lack of unprecedentedness, since it is equally incontrovertible proof that it was even warmer than now “X” + a few hundred years ago.
This year we had significant snow fall in Northern New England and NY over Memorial Day weekend. If we start getting snow in early June, I wonder how they’re going to reconcile that with AGW?
My mother (now deceased) reported to me that she saw snow fall every month of the year at least once, including (I asked her specifically) in July and August, while living in Skaneateles, NY (one of the finger lakes) between 1955 and 1960. I personally saw it while living there from September through May (and trick-or-treated in not just snow, but DEEP snow) in the stretch from 1967 to 1970.
The problem is that climate is naturally rather variable. This was the precise stretch where the climate “catastrophe” being pushed by environmentalists who wanted to blame humans for everything was catastrophic anthropogenic global cooling — air pollution was supposedly triggering an ice age.
One of the most damning comments I have read concerning the academic honesty of at least some of the warmists is the one where it was revealed that they were deliberately manipulating data and statistical fits to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. And for good reason. As Bob Carter has pointed out in considerable detail, a single glance at the non-manipulated global temperature record as determined by non-hockey-team scientists back before there was a hockey team is sufficient to convince anyone with mere common sense that it is highly premature to conclude that we are warming at all in any “unusual” way. Global temperatures and weather are well within the bounds of interglacial normal, and aren’t even particularly close to the Holocene Optimum yet, short by at least a full degree C.
SLR data is also rather confounding of the CAGW/CACC hypothesis, given that the ocean is both an enormous heat buffer that will take centuries to adjust to GHG warming (effectively neutralizing it until long after we will have stopped burning carbon for energy quite independent of CAGW) and a rather excellent global thermometer. Right now it is not showing in any convincing way that the supposed patient (the Earth) is running a temperature due to the human “infection” loosely spread out on its land surface.
Summer snow in New England or NY is not, actually, that unusual. It was only relatively unusual from the mid-70s through the mid-2000’s, during the negative phase of the PDO. If the north atlantic oscillation inverts soon, it might indeed go from being occasional to being common once again, especially on top of a relatively quiescent Sun.
The point is that both weather and climate depend on a whole host of parameters, not just CO_2, and these parameters are highly nonlinear in their effects. If anything, CO_2 is one of the relatively “simple” parameters, and we are learning (the hard way) just how complex the redistribution of surplus heat from it really is, and how naive it was to assume that any warming it produced had to be strongly amplified in a simple water vapor feedback loop. We are also learning that as far as parameters affecting climate go, CO_2 is rather a feather compared to various “hammers” such as ENSO, the PDO, the NAO, the state of the Sun, natural and anthropogenic aerosols and soot, orbital variations, and very likely additional things we don’t understand yet at all. Determining the “warming signal” of CO_2 from “noise” (really also additional climate signal, warming or cooling) is proving to be rather difficult.
Does this mean the CAGW hypothesis, or the less stringent (non-catastrophic) AGW hypothesis, is false? Not at all. It is just far from proven. I would say the catastrophic AGW hypothesis is very close to being disproven at this point, although time will tell there as it does for all things. AGW is still quite plausible, but the fraction of the post LIA warming that is natural versus manmade is very uncertain, and this makes it remarkably difficult to even begin to guess how much anthropogenic warming we have in store before the end of the century, or whether or not this “warming” will be confounded with even greater cooling from the other, probably more important, parameters.
rgb
So has anyone sent links to Joe Romm, Al Gore, Gavin, Hansen, Paul Nurse, Obama, etc…yet?
The same goes for the Similaun Man – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi – who had been buried under a glacier after his death some 5300 years ago.
Many glaciologists and politicians in Europe claimed that his resurfacing after such a long time was proof of global warming.
But few realized, that there MUST have been similary little ice on top of the Alp mountains, when Otzi was buried 5300 years ago, like when he was found.
Also to note: Never before and never since he was found, has there been so little ice on the site where Otzi was found in recent times.
Therefore, the finding of Otzi was DISPROVING global warming, rather than proving it.
The two questions that come to mind for me are: 1. How long did it take for these little fellas to develop this trait? and 2. How far under/back do these go? Could it show that at one time there was no ice where they were found?
Why is this researcher surprised that these bryophytes lay dormant for “400” years and were able to regenerate?
She states that bryophytes have survived for some 400 MILLION years. Over the last three million years, we have had multiple glaciations lasting a hundred THOUSAND years each with relatively brief (12-15,000 years) interglacials when the glaciers retreated to current conditions. The last glacial period (it is believed) covered the NYC area with a 2 mile thick ice sheet that advanced into Maryland, far beyond current tundra areas. It should be obvious that bryophytes can withstand thousands of years of dormancy under glaciers or the species would be extinct by now. Duh! Don’t these people know this planets geologic history? Or is common sense a foreign concept to today’s academia?
Bill
How about this?
http://www.nature.com/news/can-a-mammoth-carcass-really-preserve-flowing-blood-and-possibly-live-cells-1.13103
I posted this once before, but … it deserves a wider audience.
Geologist describes results from sediment core under the frozen lake El Gygytgn in remote North Eastern part of Russia. Shows periodic warming events significantly warmer than conditions today. An estimated 8 degrees warmer than current July temps! Natural variability is far greater that we are lead to believe by the catastrophists. (She even makes the point that CO2 levels and orbital forcings can’t explain the breadth of this temperature swing. Perhaps the CERN CLOUD experiments will give a big part of the missing picture?) Of course, if temperatures warmed that much today, there could certainly be some unhappy repercussions, but it is possible for it to happen completely naturally, as it has many times over the past few million years. Not surprising that some small plants are living on the margins of glaciers are adapted to intermittent glaciation.
Regarding Roman ruins found in the Alps after recent glacial retreat, Steve McIntyre cover this story in 2005, here – http://climateaudit.org/2005/11/18/archaeological-finds-in-retreating-swiss-glacier/
My take away from this is that we really must be at or near the peak of greening. What goes up … must come down. I’m glad I won’t be around a couple hundred years from now. People today are very naive about what the next cold phase is going to do.
These results are similar to a previous posting regarding plants found in retreating glaciers. Regardless of how often the interpretational fallacies of the AGW meme are reported, the beat goes on…….
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/04/will-lonnie-thompson-archive-this-new-ice-core-data/
[ The cores will provide a permanent record for future use by climate scientists, Thompson added. This is very important, as plants captured by the advancing ice cap 6,000 years ago are now emerging along its retreating margins, which shows that Quelccaya is now smaller than it has been in six thousand years.
“The frozen history from this tropical ice cap—which is melting away as Earth continues to warm—is archived in freezers at -30ºC so that creative people will have access to it 20 years from now, using instruments and techniques that don’t even exist today,” he said. ]
Which means that the MWP was REAL in the Arctic ….
We should focus more on what is beneath retreating glaciers wrt timing of prior warm times.
As in the Peru glaiciers Thompson is studying; when did they expand?
There is a lot of data to say that 3000 years ago there was a significant warm event across North America. In the Canadian Rockies, the tree level was about 100 m higher than today (at one of the high mountain cabin/resorts, Opabin Lake, lake sediment samples showing plant pollen). There were also periods of 500 – 1500 years of deserts stretching from Arizona to near the Alberta-NorthWest Territories border: there are snakes in Wood Buffalo National Park that have survived the LIA (and surrounding muskeg) by retreating into limestone caves in the summer. There are horned toads and other wildlife that are in the sand dunes of west-central Saskatchewan that are Arizona survivors. But these times are too long ago for the warmists.
The last 500 years, prior to the LIA: the temps and environment of the North is important wrt the uniqueness of AGW.
Of course, none of this matters as TODAY is special, as CO2 is warming the world, not some “natural” process. This is why Romm is unimpressed: the past doesn’t matter, at some OTHER process was at work then, in his opinion. The fact that global warming can happen through various means doesn’t matter if you have already identified the different reason it is happening today, i.e. CO2.
The past as a window on the present and future is a geological and astronomical view. It is not a sociological, humanist, anthropomorphic view that sees Man as a usurper of the Natural (Good) Way.
This post is really significant particularly as articulated by Anthony at the header. I recall a couple of UK science TV programmes about 30 years ago, one about why the Vikings died out on Greenland and another about the mystery of the large number of abandoned settlements in Scotland (pre dating the recent land clearances). For the Greenland programme modern forensics were used and by looking at pollen, dead flies, seeds and bones etc. it was determined that the climate had cooled dramatically to the point where the settlement was untenable. For the Scottish settlements the conclusion was identical.
rtj1211 says:
May 31, 2013 at 3:50 am
This is not news: you can store any seed you like frozen in ice in your food freezer. Then you can sow it again next year, the year after and germinate it.
I used to store bacterial strains carrying recombinant DNA at -70C and mammalian cells under liquid nitrogen (considerably colder) – they were viable for years.
Seeds are designed to protect genetic material from temperature stress: that’s their purpose.
Indeed, but the article says that it isn’t to do with seeds but totipotent cells like meristem cells in plants. It’s not so obvious that cells will retain their totipotency for 400 years, especially at the relatively warm temperatures that they were stored at, I doubt that it was anything close to -70ºC ( (we use -70º rather than -20º for storing DNA samples in glycerol for a reason).
Is this the plant coming to life, or something else? Don’t mosses sporulate? Are they seeing growth because the spores were still viable?
I have been an AGW global warming skeptic since Al Gore made me realize how wrong headed these Warmists are.
But I’m not sure this moss business has ANYTHING to do with temperature. I’m under the impression that glacial growth and shrinking are related not only to temperature, but also to precipitation rates. This is why there are always some glaciers expanding during the same temperature regimens during which other glaciers are shrinking.
Oh boy. I saw a movie that starts like this. In fact I’ve seen a lot of movies that start exactly like this. It never ends well.
I don’t suppose any of these “Scientists” ever heard of “precautions” or “controls” or “contamination”. Never mind, sorry I asked.
Just my observation: Alarmists probably fantasize about being born 4-8,000 years ago so they could have ‘warmist’ theories, taking credit for the sea level rise hence. My point is that if ‘cycles’ are normal, the warmist hypotheses are defective at their core, seeking to baseline normal when cyclic fluctuations are normal, lest had the rise of human civilization risen a few thousand years later our cities would be under an onslaught of ice & snow and the warmist hypothesis would be “we must have more C02”. I love science. I hate science manipulators. Warm is good; cold is BAD.
John B says @ May 31, 2013 at 2:13 am
It’s curious indeed that the alarmists do not see that this is a pretty damning piece of evidence against their ’cause’.
Not at all. Their cause demanded that the mediaeval warm period be eliminated precisely because its existence was damning to their cause and that is why they have done everything they can to downplay it. If the current warming is within historical natural variations, then the cause is lost; also the funds.
From the video of Julie Brigham-Grette posted above.discussing at 8:40
http://youtu.be/YxbOSB7zDgY?t=8m40s
125,000 years ago
globally 1 or 2 degrees warmer than present
The arctic was 2, 3 or 4 degrees warmer than present.
scientist agree greenland icesheet was 40% to 50% of it’s present size
I wonder if it would screw up the radiocarbon dating, when *newly growing* plants colonizing the area do feast on the remains of 400 to 600 year old *dead* plants?
Geeez…
I am astonished at some few commenting in here not realizing the huge significance of a finding clearly showing that this point from under a retreating glacier was ice free only 400 years ago!
Everywhere in the CAGW (oh, that’s right, they have recently removed the C, but still regard it as a disaster of some sort, right?) story is this talk of unprecedented retreat of glaciers …. (see wiki on the topic) … but now we are simply back where we were 400 years ago.
Hmmm …. DOSSAGW … Disaster of Some Sort Anthropogenic Global Warming. Oh that’s right … It is now also changed to CC; Climate Change.
So we therefore have DOSSACC … not bad, eh? !!!
Or how about DOSRUSACC; Disaster of Some Really Undefined Sort Anthropogenic Climate Change.
Ashby says: May 31, 2013 at 8:22 am
I posted this once before, but … it deserves a wider audience.
a bit late in responding, agree with wider audience & thanks for that link Ashby.
has Anthony or coposters on WUWT ever covered this item & I missed it, anybody ?
I got the link in a comments section in Forbes from a CAGW true believer. Watched it with interest. I thought careful viewing showed something other than the catastrophists would like us to believe. I don’t think Anthony ever covered it (and it’s pretty recent). Looks like good honest science to me and I think her data shows something very interesting, if perhaps a bit different than she appears to think…
Oh, and when I watched it, it only had about 600 views total… my guess is it could use a bit more exposure.