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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
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.