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Weird creatures trapped in a sunless, frigid, briny dungeon deep beneath the ice at Blood Falls — has a nice horror-movie ring to it, doesn’t it? And for microbes, they have quite the exotic back story. They’ve been living in dark pockets of an ancient saltwater lake trapped under the advancing Taylor Glacier in Antarctica between 2 million and 4 million years ago.

How did the microbes survived all that time without light, photosynthesis, or outside nutrients? Jill Mikucki, one of the researchers who reported the microbes’ existence in 2007, now reports on their unusual survival mechanism. In the current issue of Science, Dr. Mikucki and other researchers conclude that the microbes metabolize organic matter in the water by using sulphate to facilitate reduction of iron in the bedrock — the same iron that helps produce the rusty color of Blood Falls when the water from the subglacial pools reaches the snout of the glacier.

The microbes have been living in pools of brine beneath 400 meters of glacial ice, according to Dr. Mikucki, a research associate in the department of earth sciences at Dartmouth. I asked her to explain to Lab readers the chief significance of these discoveries. Her answer:

Our work has demonstrated how microbes gain energy and grow below ice in the absence of sunlight for extended periods of time. Subglacial environments are difficult to access and therefore remain largely unexplored. The fact that we were able to describe how microbes can eke out a living below ice is rather interesting considering that we only recently realized life existed below glaciers.

When subglacial brine is actively discharged it provides a window into an ecosystem that has been cut off from the surface for possibly millions of years. The microbes have remained viable despite these extreme circumstances. There are also interesting implications to how life might have survived during past so-called ‘Snowball Earth’ events, of below the ice-caps of Mars or on Europa.

I welcome your thoughts on this finding. Or any idea for the plot of that horror movie at Blood Falls.
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