Scientists from Penn State claim to have found a new living bacterial species a couple of miles into the Greenland ice sheet. They estimate that the bacteria have been trapped there for about 120,000 years, and have apparently survived in the extreme conditions so far under ice. This is a pretty cool discovery in several aspects, and the news piece on Penn State Live explains it very well:

The microorganism’s ability to persist in this low-temperature, high-pressure, reduced-oxygen and nutrient-poor habitat makes it particularly useful for studying how life, in general, can survive in a variety of extreme environments on Earth and possibly elsewhere in the solar system.

In my recent article on the dinosaur asteroid impact, I mention that scientists believe that could have spread micro-organisms from Earth into space, and with the newfound persistent form of bacteria life, they might be able to survive this kind of event and settle on another celestial body, even if it’s colder and icier than Earth.

Another thing worth mentioning about this discovery is the method they used to dig up the bacteria from these seemingly unreachable depths. Ice core drilling is used in a lot of scientific areas, like research in prehistoric biology like this, but even more in climate research, where ice cores act like a recorder of a lot of useful climatic states and events. From the Wikipedia article on ice cores:

The variety of climatic proxies is greater than in any other natural recorder of climate, such as tree rings or sediment layers. These include (proxies for) temperature, ocean volume, precipitation, chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, sea-surface productivity, desert extent and forest fires.

A lot of research is being done on ice cores right now, and it is of particular interest in our times of climate changes and debates on the issue. With the added probability of finding exotic life forms in these extreme conditions, we should encourage the research even more. There is really a lot of things to learn down there.