Researchers found Antarctic moss can spring back to life after being covered with ice for 1,500 years.
Before this finding was made regeneration of frozen plant material had only been demonstrated after about two decades of inactivity, a Cell Press news release reported. Until now microbes were the only organisms known to have the ability to regenerate after such a long period of time.
"These mosses were basically in a very long-term deep freeze," Peter Convey of the British Antarctic Survey, said in the news release. "This timescale of survival and recovery is much, much longer than anything reported for them before."
Moss is important to the Antarctic ecosystem and works to store the region's fixed carbon dioxide. Studying polar moss cores can help researchers gain insight into the past climate conditions.
"The researchers use them to assess growth rates over time and as proxies to reconstruct aspects of the environment and environmental change over time," the news release reported.
The oldest Antarctic moss that has been studied is between 5,000 and 6,000 years old; the moss looked at in this recent study is about 2,000 years old. In the past researchers didn't think moss that had been frozen for more than two decades would be able to be revived. The team was shocked when they saw the 1,500-year-old moss start to regrow.
"We actually did very little other than slice the moss core very carefully," Convey said.
The researchers were extremely careful not to let any other life forms get into the moss, which was sliced and placed in an incubator; soon after new shoots started to appear from the thawed moss.
"The potential clearly exists for much longer survival-although viability between successive interglacials would require a period of at least tens of thousands of years," the researchers wrote, the news release reported. "Such a possibility provides an entirely new survival mechanism and a refugium for a major element of the polar terrestrial biota."
