What do you think you’ll find inside a permanently frozen Antarctic lake? As if the name Enigma Lake wasn’t mysterious enough, polar scientists have discovered that beneath its icy surface some of the best We have just discovered a unique community of microorganisms that lives with us.
An international team of polar researchers has discovered a microbiome living beneath the permafrost ice of Lake Enigma in Antarctica. Their findings are detailed in a study published Dec. 3 in the journal Communication Earth and Environmentrevealing a previously unknown ecosystem and suggesting a lake that once flourished with life before it froze over.
Enigma Lake is located between two glaciers, Amorphous Glacier and Boulder Clay Glacier, in the northern foothills of Antarctica. Given that the region’s average temperature reaches 6.8 degrees Fahrenheit (-14 degrees Celsius) and the low temperature reaches -41.26 degrees Fahrenheit (-40.7 degrees Celsius), experts understandably believe that Enigma Lake is completely frozen. I guessed that it was.
In the summers of 2019 and 2020, a team including researchers from the Italian National Research Council Institute of Polar Sciences (ISP-CNR) surprisingly discovered that the lake was not completely frozen. Using ground-penetrating radar, they discovered a layer of water up to 39.4 feet (12 meters) deep about 36 feet (11 meters) below the ice surface.
So the team drilled into the ice and collected samples using techniques that prevent water contamination. When the researchers returned to the lab, they discovered something surprising in the sample: life.
They identified microorganisms that include bacteria such as: Pseudomonadota, actinomycetesand Bacteroidetaand also “the presence, and sometimes even the predominance, of microbacteria belonging to the superphylum.” puttybacteria” the researchers wrote in their study. upper gate puttybacteria It is a very simple bacterium with limited functions.
“Taken together, these features reveal new complexity in Antarctic lake food webs,” the researchers wrote.
These results lead the researchers to suggest that the lake may once have had a thriving and diverse microbial community before it froze. It is unknown when Enigma Lake froze over, but about 10 years ago the entire continent of Antarctica was covered in ice. 14 million years agosuggesting that Lake Enigma would have also frozen by then. Once the ice solidified, some of the microorganisms would have survived. This means that the bacteria the researchers identified in the lab may be descendants of this original, ancient community. But they are probably different from their ancestors, probably after millions of years of isolated development.
Antarctica is classified as: desert;Despite the presence of thick ice sheets, precipitation is very low. As a result, the researchers also suggested that since the lake had not yet dried up, there was likely an undiscovered water source, perhaps a nearby amorphous glacier. However, the study says Enigma Lake is still “isolated from the external environment by a permanent ice sheet” and is characterized by a “chemically stratified water column.” In other words, its isolation and stable stratification Potential drainage of the glacier has not caused significant external pollution.
Ultimately, the discovery of microbes in such extreme environments sheds light on current life forms in Antarctica that are invisible to the naked eye and suggests an ancient ecosystem that thrived on the frozen continent millions of years ago. That’s it.
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