CNN is carrying the story of a bacteria recovered from deep drilling in Alaska that was thawed out and found to be alive. The age of the ice it was found in is estimated at 30,000 years. CNN is running the story from a “Possibility of life on Mars” angle, but what about this angle: do you think we would be immune to disease causing bacteria from 30,000 years ago released due to global warming?
Something to think about.
“The organism froze on Earth some 30,000 years ago, and was apparently alive all that time and started swimming as soon as it thawed, said Richard Hoover from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
The life form — a bacterium dubbed Carnobacterium pleistocenium — probably flourished in the Pleistocene Age, along with woolly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers, said Hoover.
He discovered the bacterium near the town of Fox, Alaska, in a tunnel drilled through permafrost — a mix of permanently frozen ice, soil and rock — that is kept at a constant temperature of 24.8 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 4 degrees Celcius).
“When they cut into the Fox tunnel, they actually cut through Pleistocene ice wedges, which are similar to structures that we see on Mars,” Hoover said in a telephone interview.
The ice wedges contained a golden-brown layer about a half-yard (half-meter) thick, and this layer contained a group of microscopic brownish bacteria, Hoover said.
When he looked at a small sample of this bacteria-laden ice under a microscope, Hoover said, “These bacteria that had just thawed out of the ice … were swimming around. The instant the ice melted, they started swimming. They were alive … but they had been frozen for over 30,000 years.”
