Arctic glaciers are teeming with “zombies”: scientists have made an unexpected discovery

At first glance, the glaciers of the Arctic seem completely lifeless. But it is not. Many microscopic life forms can be found in the ice sheets of Greenland and Iceland. Like seasonal zombies, many of these organisms hibernate during the winter, only waking up from their frosty slumber when things start to melt in the summer.

About the incredible diversity in the Arctic permafrost, which even scientists recently did not know, was told by Science Alert. Now they are making rather gloomy predictions about the future of these microorganisms due to a warming climate.

According to microbiologist Alexander Anesio from the University of Aarhus in Sweden, up to 4,000 different species can be found in a small pool of melt water on a glacier. These are bacteria, and fungi, and viruses, and algae. “It’s a whole ecosystem that we didn’t know existed until recently,” he said. When researchers took a close look at ice and snow on two glaciers in Iceland and Greenland in mid-to-late summer, more than half of the bacteria they found were active. The rest remained dormant or were dead.

However, when all these organisms were placed in warmer conditions, most of the dormant organisms revived, regained the ability to read genes and produce the building blocks of amino acids. Evidence from these studies suggests that microbial communities on snow and ice can quickly respond to changes in ice melt.

But while adapting to climate change is generally considered a good thing, at least at the species level, it is also true that a sudden change at the level of one organism can destabilize the entire system. Climate change is expected to bring more precipitation and winter thaws to the Arctic in the future, and some microbes have already begun to thrive in the slush.

Snow algae, best seen in Greenland’s meltwater, is a deep, dark purple, and in recent years, scientists like Anesio have noticed patches of this color have begun to spread. The dark appearance of snow and ice means that such a surface absorbs more sunlight, and this, in turn, accelerates melting by 20%.

Meanwhile, snow algae are not included in current climate models. And it is precisely their lack of microbes in the ice that is just one of the explanations for why Greenland’s glaciers are actually melting faster than such a model suggests. A previous study, for example, found that adding water to the snowpack for two months resulted in a 48% increase in snow algae. After just three days of thawing in the lab, some samples from the current study contained 35% more active microbes than before.

“Critically, our results show that glacial microorganisms are capable of responding to short-term melting events occurring on a time scale of hours to days, short enough that periodic melting at the surface of glaciers could potentially affect the functioning of glacial ecosystems. Biogeochemical cycles ‘, the scientists write.

But their forecast indicates that increased warming in winter will become widespread with subsequent climate change. And this can lead to ecological changes in glaciers.

Earlier, GLOBAL HAPPENINGS talked about the world ocean temperature record, which alarmed scientists.