From the UNIVERSITY OF YORK and the “that’s gonna leave a mark” department.
For the first time scientists have directly observed living bacteria in polar ice and snow — an environment once considered sterile
For the first time scientists have directly observed living bacteria in polar ice and snow – an environment once considered sterile. The new evidence has the potential to alter perceptions about which planets in the universe could sustain life and may mean that humans are having an even greater impact on levels of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere than accepted evidence from climate history studies of ice cores suggests.
Gases captured and sealed in snow as it compresses into ice can provide researchers with snapshots of the Earth’s atmosphere going back hundreds of thousands of years. Climate scientists use ice core samples to look at prehistoric levels of CO2 in the atmosphere so they can be compared with current levels in an industrial age.
This analysis of ice cores relies on the assumption that there is limited biological activity altering the environment in the snow during its transition into ice. Research reported today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, which has directly observed microbial activity in Antarctic and Arctic snow, has revealed that the composition of these small samples of gas trapped in the ice may have been affected by bacteria that remain active in snow while it is being compressed into ice – a process that can last decades.
Lead author of the research Dr Kelly Redeker from the Department of Biology at the University of York said “As microbial activity and its influence on its local environment has never been taken into account when looking at ice-core gas samples it could provide a moderate source of error in climate history interpretations. Respiration by bacteria may have slightly increased levels of CO2 in pockets of air trapped within polar ice caps meaning that before human activity CO2 levels may have been even lower than previously thought”.
“In addition, the fact that we have observed metabolically active bacteria in the most pristine ice and snow is a sign of life proliferating in environments where you wouldn’t expect it to exist. This suggests we may be able to broaden our horizons when it comes to thinking about which planets are capable of sustaining life,” Redeker added.
Research conducted in laboratories has previously shown that bacteria can stay alive at extremely cold temperatures, but this study is the first time that bacteria have been observed altering the polar snow environment in situ.
The researchers looked at snow in is natural state, and in other areas they sterilised it using UV sterilising lamps. When they compared the results the team found unexpected levels of methyl iodide – a gas known to be produced by marine bacteria – in the untouched snow.
Cutting-edge techniques enabled the researchers to detect the presence of gases even at part-per-trillion levels, one million times less concentrated than atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
The researchers worked on sites in the Arctic and Antarctic and took precautions to limit the impact of sunlight and wind, using tarpaulins to protect their sample sites and positioning themselves on the middle of a glacier away from soil and other forms of polar wildlife which might contaminate the snow.
The results of the study also suggest that life can be sustained even in remote, cold, nutrient poor environments, offering a new perspective on whether the frozen planets of the universe could support microorganisms.
With more research, astrobiologists working to identify planets in the universe with temperature levels that could allow for the presence of liquid water may be able to expand the zones they consider potentially habitable to include planets where water is found as ice.
“We know that bacteria have the potential to remain viable and metabolically active at low temperatures for hundreds to thousands of years,” said Redeker. “The next step is to look further down to see if we can observe active bacteria deep in the ice caps,”
###
The paper (preprint): http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/124852/1/Redeker.pdf
“Microbial metabolism directly affects trace gases in (sub) polar snowpacks” is published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
Abstract:
Concentrations of trace gases trapped in ice are considered to develop uniquely from direct snow/atmosphere interactions at the time of contact. This assumption relies upon limited or no biological, chemical or physical transformations occurring during transition from snow to firn to ice; a process that can take decades to complete. Here, we present the first evidence of environmental alteration due to in situ microbial metabolism of trace gases (methyl halides and dimethyl sulphide) in Polar snow. We collected evidence for ongoing microbial metabolism from an Arctic and an Antarctic location during different years. Methyl iodide production in the snowpack decreased significantly after exposure to enhanced UV radiation. Our results also show large variations in the production and consumption of other methyl halides, including methyl bromide and methyl chloride, used in climate interpretations. These results suggest that this long neglected microbial activity could constitute a potential source of error in climate history interpretations, by introducing a so far unappreciated source of bias in the quantification of atmospheric+derived trace gases trapped within the Polar ice caps.
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Elmer,
See:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD410.html
Read the draft paper. There is one very big item missing, without which it is not possible to exclude mere physical/chemical reactions between known trace gasses and water phases. They sampled trace gasses at ppt (!!!) levels that naturally exist in the air thanks to biological activity. What they did NOT do was take corresponding snow samples after getting the trace gas samples, gently melt them, midrofilter the meltwater, and use a microscope to show there really were snow bacteria. And, then culturing those bacteria in 0C meltwater with nutrients to show thentrace gas productiin at higher quantities because of more benign conditions. Without bodies (and maybe some living ones), I am very skeptical. Finding bacteria is what Leeuwenhoek used the newly invented ~1590 by Jansen microscope for in the first place. Why such a simple clinching experiment was not done is beyond comprehension—unless the whole thing was suspect from the beginning.
Already been done:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC92333/
I guess it’s back to stomata studies again then …
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/stomata.html
Haven’t you seen Star Trek (2009) or Star Wars? Everybody knows frozen planets are packed with huge dangerous animals. A few bacteria in an ice core is like nothing, really. These scientists get excited with the simplest things.
Yes, and they grow to such size by feasting on the occasional luckless marooned space traveler.
If they’ve found one form of Bacteria in ice, how do they know there are not others that use up CO2 and leave O2? Wouldn’t sunlight be the best source of energy to a bacterium trapped in nearly-frozen water? And wouldn’t sunlight indicate that some form of photosynthesis would be more likely than respiration?
There are. They are known as cyanobacteria and are widespread in Antarctica.
Those bacteria are hardy critters:
https://www.space.com/38922-extraterrestrial-bacteria-international-space-station.html
Bacteria ‘from Outer Space’ Found on Space Station, Cosmonaut Says: Report
“Scientists have detected living bacteria “from outer space” in samples collected from the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS) during spacewalks, cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov told Russia’s state-owned TASS news agency.”
end excerpt
So how much of the CO2 in the air bubbles gets absorbed into the ice?
Yogi Bear,
Not much to hide:
If they use the grating technique, ice is crushed under vacuum and water vapor removed in a cold trap (-70ºC).
Another technique sublimates everything under vacuum (99% recovery for CO2) and freezes everything, including N2 and O2, cryogenic. Then each part is evaporated separately and measured via a mass spectrometer, including the isotopic composition.
Both methods show the same CO2 levels.
See slide 6 of 8 at:
http://courses.washington.edu/proxies/GHG.pdf
A systemic error is likely built into the analysis, one way or the other. In the early days of ice core analysis, results greater than 1000 ppm were regularly obtained. These were eventually thrown out and high results were blamed on contamination, poor sampling, etc. Eventually, they developed methods that consistently gave the results that they expected.
“Both methods show the same CO2 levels”
Dry extraction; 99% extraction efficiency, but it’s all mixed together.
That got chopped short by wordpress, second try…
“Both methods show the same CO2 levels”
Dry extraction; 99% extraction efficiency, but it’s all mixed together.
Third time lucky?
Dry extraction; <80% efficiency, +/- 38% for CO2 (that's huge).
R. Shearer,
The early methods of extraction needed huge parts of the ice core and contamination with drilling fluid were quite often. That was what Neftel said in his description of the Siple ice core: where huge values were found drilling fluid had contaminated the sample. Measurements of several parts of the same sampling depths did show huge differences in CO2 levels, including “normal” values in line with other depths. A new core was drilled many years later and no contamination or high values were encountered.
Yogi Bear,
Less than 80% recovery is about the total air recovered, CO2 remains the same if you measure in 80% or 99% of the air bubbles…
The dry extraction is only measuring the air bubble content while the sublimation is measuring the total gas content, so how can they be the same? And the dry extraction doesn’t show how much CO2 the ice has absorbed, plus the error margin of +/- 38% for CO2 is huge.
Yogi BEar,
Both methods extract air, not only CO2. The grating technique recovers some 80% of all air, the sublimation technique over 99%. Both give the CO2 content as a ratio between CO2 and air, which is essentially the same, no matter if you measure in 1 air bubble or 80% of all air bubbles ot 99% of all air bubbles…
Yogi Bear,
Accuracy for the CO2 measurement with the grating technique is +/- 0.38% on CO2, thus for 300 ppmv they find values of 300 +/- 1.2 ppmv.
My bad, I didn’t see the zero and point. But the sublimation method also includes water vapour.
A huge variety of microbes occur in water lakes under the ice sheets in Antarctica (see link below). Most of these live in anoxic, very very saline water. In many cases this water is warmer than expected because of microbial respiration and these biological communities have survived and evolved isolated from the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. Clearly there is also ‘life’ within the ice (or has been) and of course these biota will have changed the gas contents and ratios within the ice. NASA has been onto this for many years as the fauna offer insights into extraterestrial life forms. https://www.nature.com/news/lakes-under-the-ice-antarctica-s-secret-garden-1.15729
[saline water ?? .mod]
Yes mod, very saline water is typical of Antarctic under-ice lakes. They are often also highly sulfidic. This is mostly due to the respiration chemistries of microbes living in an oxygen-free environment in layered/stratified communities within the water. Some under-ice lake waters may approach the Archean – paleoproterozoic sea chemistry when microbes were the only living form and survived without oxygen or very low oxygen levels.
[Thank you for the clarification. .mod]
Thank you for those trying to shine a light of truth into this scientific gloom.
Wouldn’t be surprised if this study will (or was designed to) be used to get rid of the pesky temp-CO2 lag in ice cores
What if it turned out the causality was bi-directional? Would that assuage your suspicions?
Photosynthesizing cyanobacteria are widespread in Antarctica, including on the ice near the Pole (Carpenter, E.J., Lin, S. and Capone, D.G., Bacterial activity in South Pole snow. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 2000, 66: 4514-4517).
If they occur below the surface (though still in the photic zone) they might well lower the amount of CO2 by photosynthesis.
Has anyone ever taken samples from amber and compared them with ice?
“Uh, oh”
Why politicise it? Agenda?
[“uh oh”, as in it means they’ll have to check the science based on ice cores to be sure they aren’t affected. No politics in that, except in your mind. -Anthony]
The header would have meant that without adding “uh oh”. In the context of your creative headlines uh oh sounds a lot like a dog whistle.
[and your comments sound a lot like the kool-aid talking -Anthony]
“No pollen in Antarctica. Not much carbon-containing dust either.”
– Nick Stokes, December 20, 2017 at 11:45 am
—–
Absolutely written in stone. No, wait. Scratch that.
Slartibartfast is a Magrathean, and a designer of planets. His favourite part of the job was creating coastlines, the most notable of which were the fjords found on the coast of Norway on planet Earth, for which he won an award. While Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect were on ancient Earth, they saw Slartibartfast’s signature deep inside a glacier in ancient Norway.
—–
Yes. Written deep inside a glacier.
Ah, yes – the lovely fjords, the Norwegian Blue parrotts are pining for them! 🙂
Hm. This seems to confirm one of my thoughts about wholly rhinos, mammoth and other megafauna extinction.
What we have in the ice core is at moments close to CO2 starvation for C3 plants (180 ppm and lower)
There are also studies that showed some trees suffered from CO2 starvation during the ice age.
This would mean C3 plants especially the short lived like forbs may have suffered.
-> C3 plants + CO2 starvation – these plants become rare and cannot sustain the population feeding on them
We also know the megafauna existent until about 40k-20k years ago was eating mostly forbs (C3 plants)
no plants => megafauna starvation
Probably extinction of the megafauna that is so much blamed of humans may have been a result in changes in the environment cause by CO2 starvation
What is interesting is that even if CO2 concentration started to rise at the beginning of the Holocene it seems it was too late for the C3 plants, the plains in Siberia which were covered with forbs are now covered with other plants (there was a study confirming this too). This may have been the case in other areas too.
Of course humans may have played a role too, but a population that was already pushed at the survival limits could more easily go extinct.
Certainly this idea will not get too much traction with the ‘CO2 is evil’ crowd…
Just a minute though – They’re measuring the CO2 level of air that’s been in contact with ice? Does any of the ice melt whilst extracting the air? CO2 is highly soluble in water, so any measurement of levels in the trapped air would be totally meaningless, would they not?
This could be relevant:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140922110424.htm
When you think a bit about this, it’s questionable if anything can be deduced from CO2 levels in trapped air. The levels in the original air could have been higher or lower.
Ian,
Sea ice and snow glacier ice have little in common: there are very small quantities of carbonates in glacier ice, so these are no carbon sinks at all.
The measurements of CO2 in ice are performed under vacuum. Any liquid water, including any CO2 dissolved in it is removed and water is trapped in a cold trap at -70ºC, where very little liquid-like water is left at the surface.
So the discrepancy is in Parts per Trillion to the Parts per Millions of CO2 and this is somehow significant? When the charts show past CO2 and Global Temperature never matched over the history of Earth. The CO2 was not considered to be a factor of Climate Change. And the biological timelines with massive increase and decrease of flora and fauna show us that CO2 levels played a significant roll in their existence and demise as climates changed from warm to cold. No matter what the extent of CO2 in Ice Cores have shown over history. Live and dead and fossils of flora and fauna thereof show us what was and is significant.
I’m not lichen the idea of tiny critters invading our treaty-protected polar environments and corrupting the ice cores, places where life has no right to be.