University of Alberta Professor Catherine La Farge successful brought back 400-year-old frozen moss to life in her Edmonton lab.
Professor Catherine La Farge makes it a point to camp at the Teardrop glacier on Ellesmere Island in Canada's North during the Arctic summers. During those trips, she's witnessed the ice retreat, up to four meters a year now, giving her the an opportunity to discover what lies beneath the 400-year-old frozen blanket.
While exploring the new sight, Farge came across a patch of moss that had a green tint to it. This led her to wonder whether life could still have existed under this frozen blanket.
In her lab, Farge was astonished to find that the moss still had a capacity to revive itself, even after being buried under the ice since the Little Ice Age. Previous studies have discovered plants under Arctic glaciers but scientists usually presumed they were dead, considering their lifeless and discolored look.
Farge began the experiment in 2009 after discovering a tiny green stem in the moss she had got back to her lab and could think of only two explanations for this. "Either it kept its color under the glacier or it grew after the moss emerged 400 years later," she said.
For the experiment, the scientist ground up the old plant material in petri dishes full of potting soil and set it in the grow chamber next to her office. She then watched for signs of life. In about four to six weeks, she noticed tiny green filaments or strands called protonema beginning to grow. Months later, a dish was almost full of green moss from cells frozen for 400 years. Of 24 samples potted, seven produced new growth.
"It was just incredible," La Farge said. "Now we have Little Ice Age moss material that produced juvenile plants. Now we have to think there may be populations of land plants that survived that freezing.
It makes you wonder what's under the big ice caps in the Arctic and Antarctic and alpine glaciers," she said. "And we have a 400-year-old lineage of genetic material."
