Many movies and stories have discussed the idea of freezing a person in ice so they could wake up years into the future. Researchers say mosses near Ellesmere Island have accomplished this feat, according to The Christian Science Monitor.
Dr. Catherine LaFarge and her fellow researchers at the University of Alberta discovered the moss that had been frozen in glaciers for centuries—and then began to grow, seemingly picking up where they left off.
The researchers recovered anywhere from 60 to 144 different types of moss.
The mosses were found near Teardrop Glacier on Ellesmere Island on land that had recently been concealed by the massive mountains of ice. Teardrop has begun to recede like many of the glaciers across the globe.
According to LaFarge, they saw many mosses on the once-covered land, a majority of which were black. However, a few were green and drew the researchers in for closer examination.
"As I looked more closely I thought, 'Oh my gosh, what's this? Either this has somehow managed to retain a vestige of its original color, or it's just started to grow again after centuries under the ice,'" she said in an interview with National Geographic. "The thought of that just blew my mind."
This is not the first time explorers have seen the green mosses. It was always believed the mosses had simply taken the place of dead plants.
However, LaFarge and her team got some of the darkened moss, placed it under a grow lamp and—in about a month and a half—watched the centuries-old plants grow. According to their findings, these plants could have been around as far back as 1398.
Moss cells have the ability to copy and multiply into whatever the plant requires—without the need for sexual reproduction components. This ability gives the plants a leg up, but researchers are still surprised by the plants’ resilience to survive for centuries buried in ice.
Moss is important to ecosystems where the ground is always frozen and affected by glaciers. The mosses act as nourishment for animals such as rabbits and deer in an area where there are not many food sources.
