British researchers have discovered evidence of diverse life forms, dating back more than 100,000 years, in sediments of a subglacial lake on the Antarctic Peninsula.
Hodgson Lake (David A. Pearce et al).
Hodgson Lake is 305 feet deep and 1.2 miles long by 0.93 miles wide. It was covered by more than 1,300 feet of ice at the end of the last Ice Age, but is now considered to be an emerging subglacial lake, with a thin covering of just 11.5 feet of ice.
The lake was thought to be a harsh environment for any form of life but the layers of mud at the bottom of the lake represent a time capsule storing the DNA of the microbes which have lived there throughout the millennia.
Drilling through the ice the team used clean coring techniques to delve into the sediments at the bottom of Hodgson Lake.
The top few inches of cores contained current and recent organisms which inhabit the lake – two Streptomyces sp., three Sporosarcina sp. and fifteen Arthrobacter sp.
Hodgson Lake: 100,000 Year Old Life Found in Antarctic Subglacial Lake
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