A cold origin

Brinicles, filmed forming in situ for the first time in 2011, were presented as fingers of death. But Julyan Cartwright and others observe that they create chemical gradients, electric potentials and membranes – that, is all the conditions necessary for the formation of life.

Brinicles, says a post via MIT Technology review, could be ubiquitous on ocean bearing planets and moons such as Europa, where they might play equally interesting roles.

Life in "the world’s largest wetland"

Scientists say they have found bacteria living in the cold and dark deep under half a mile of Antarctic ice, a discovery that might advance knowledge of how life could survive on other planets or moons and that offers the first glimpse of a vast ecosystem of microscopic life in underground lakes in Antarctica.

-- New York Times report

P.S. 8 March Russian scientist claim to have found new kind of bacterial life in Lake Vostok.

"At the bottom of the world we can look through a window into our very distant past"

...Cyanobacteria are resourceful organisms. They produce their own energy using a photosynthesis process similar to plants. Light penetrates through the ice cover and through the water down to the lake floor where the microbes grow. Because of a lack of predation and a lack of disturbance by larger organisms, these microbes grow rampant over any surface that is hospitable for growth (in this case any depth that light can reach).
This type of microbial growth is actually quite common in Antarctic and Arctic lakes. What makes Lake Untersee particularly special is that these microbes form two different types of structures – collections of millions of individuals growing together over thousands of years of layered development.

The microbes of Untersee form two distinct kinds of constructions – pinnacles and cones. Both the pinnacles and cones are types of microbial communities and represent one of the earliest forms of life, present in the fossil record nearly 3.5 billion years ago.

The pinnacles of our lake are small, between one-half inch and six inches tall and dominated by a Leptolyngbya species that is common in Antarctica. The other structures, found nowhere else on present-day earth, are the conical stromatolites. The microbes covering the cones aren’t very thick, roughly half a millimeter, but the dark purple cones can grow higher than one and a half feet. These cones consist predominately of a Phormidium species, and it’s thought that the different microbial species are somehow responsible for the creation of the different structures...

-- Michael Becker

What in me is dark illumine

East Antarctic ice is gaining mass. The dry valleys remain cold for now so the strange beings, living in a pitch dark lake seven times as salty as the sea, 13 degrees below freezing and buried for 2800 years under 20 metres of ice, probably have a future.

P.S. 2 Dec. Search begins for life in another lake, which has been buried under three kilometres of ice for a million years. 

Hyperwarming

Studies suggest that long-term climate models up to the year 2300 are missing key positive feedbacks that could send global temperatures towards levels high enough to melt the ice, if not over the entire Gamburtsevs, then at least large parts of even Antarctica for the first time in over 30 million years:

In particular, the release of methane from melting Arctic permafrost has not yet been factored in. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, but remains in the atmosphere for only 10 years on average before it reacts with hydroxyl radicals in the air to form CO2. However, a large release of methane from melting permafrost could swamp the hydroxyl supply, allowing the methane to linger in the atmosphere for 15 years or more, further amplifying the warming. 

Some feedbacks never before considered might also come into play... In the future oceans may store less carbon. Normally some atmospheric carbon is lost at sea, buried in the carcasses of tiny marine animals. But sediment from the Eocene contains little carbon, suggesting that this process failed during the last hothouse...

Reversing this?

Tales from the Crysophere

For literally centuries, polar explorers have been aware that in the springtime the bottom of seasonal sea ice becomes visible discolored. Today we know that what they were seeing is a photosynthesis-based biofilm of grand proportions. By March, when the sun spends enough time above the horizon to initiate the ice-algal bloom, the sea ice cover over the Arctic Ocean alone (sea ice also surrounds Antarctica, of course) extends more than 14 million square kilometers, even in this era of climate-driven reductions in the cryosphere. Only in the last decade, however, have we realized that this highly porous sea ice, flushed at its ice-water interface with seawater from below, is also filled with EPS, the sticky exudates of microscopic algae and bacteria that partially account for their entrapment in the ice as it forms in autumn and through winter. These compounds, which partition into the brine phase of the ice along with the microbes and other “impurities” of seawater, are now understood to serve a myriad of biological functions within the ice, from cryo- and osmoprotection to possible viral defense.

-- from Frost Flowers Come to Life by Jody Deming

'Gaia likes it cold,' said James Lovelock.

Sea pig

-- a holothurian among creatures studied by BAS (BBC highlights here)

Ice singers

This clip brings to mind a similar experience in Svaalbard in 2003.

Through a hydrophone in the sea comes a series of long whistles that start high and descend, very gradually – ever so slowly – right down the scale. They sound like a cross between The Clangers and fireworks or artillery, but more gentle and sweet. It is bearded seals. This sound is suspended in a deep, vast, echoing underwater world, where crustaceans rustle and click in the far distance.

The sounds made by 'our' seals -- (Arctic) bearded seals rather than (Antarctic) Weddell seals -- were more fluted and song-like.

(Herzog clip via Zooillogix)

Cold comfort

Around 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, about 90 per cent of land species were wiped out as global temperatures soared. A cat-sized distant relative of mammals, Kombuisia antarctica, seems to have survived the extinction by fleeing south to Antarctica.

-- finds a study by Jörg Fröbisch et al. This provides valuable evidence that animals today could survive climate change by migrating, Peter Mayhew tells New Scientist. But today, says David Jablonski, humans have so thoroughly fragmented much of the land surface with cities, suburbs, farmland and highways that many species cannot make the necessary range shifts.

There are other factors too. Most obviously, Antarctica is further south than it was 250 million years ago and no longer joined to other land masses.

In 2007 Stephen Pyne described Antarctica as an analogue for space, so barren of life is its great centre.


Still, if climatic change proves to be very large -- with for example, a rise of more than 4 or 6 C in global average temperature, and rises far greater than that at the poles -- Antarctic ecology will change beyond recognition. The continent's present fauna will be devastated. Some plant and animal species will arrive from the north will-he nill-he, but others could be deliberately transplanted, and a rapidly emerging set of new ecosystems protected and managed, to a limited extent, by people who somehow succeed in keeping the human urge to extract and despoil every last resource under control. The Gamburtsevs could teem with life (an idée fixe on this blog).

Much of the rest of the world may be blasted and wrecked. But fragments of the song of songs would continue in full voice in what had been the deadest place on the planet.

Antarctic Highlands, 3009 AD?

For science rather than wild speculation see SCAR's report on Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment.

P.S. 18 Dec: Data to expose 'ghost mountains'

A new place for life

There's been a lot of climate change over the last 14 million years, and what we can say about this place in the middle of the Antarctic is that nothing has changed.

But if levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide continue to rise, in around 1,000 years they will approach the same levels that existed before there was persistent ice sheet in Antarctica.

-- Martin Siegert, University of Edinburgh (BBC)

Blood falls

Scientists have found life in an ecosystem trapped underneath a glacier in Antarctica for nearly 2 million years. The microbes, they suggest, are surviving the dark, oxygen-free waters by drawing energy from sulfur and iron. The findings provide insight into how life may have survived "Snowball Earth"--periods when some scientists speculate that the planet was entombed in ice--and hint at the possibility of life in other inhospitable environments, such as Mars and Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

-- from Ancient Ecosystem Discovered Beneath Antarctic Glacier.

In Life Ascending, Nick Lane quotes Albert Szent-Györgyi: "Life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest".

The beast stirs

The ice bridge "almost exploded" - David Vaughan.

P.S. 6 April: RealClimate; 7 April: Giant mass of Antarctic ice 'set for collapse'.

A place for life

This blog has speculated on the Gamburtsevs as a place for future life. It is now reported that liquid water flows in their valleys. Perhaps this already allows strange microbes life to flourish.


P.S. Environment ministers huddle.

A global stomach

Chiasmodon niger, or the black swallower -- a deep-sea fish that can extend its stomach to three times its size to swallow fish that are larger than itself -- is one of hundreds "bipolar" species spanning between the polar regions.

A BBC report has more detail. One possible explanation may be that:

the deep ocean at the poles falls as low as -1C (30F), but the deep ocean at the equator might not get above 4C (39F).

There is continuity in the ocean as a result of the major current systems...; a lot of these animals have egg and larvae stages that can get transferred in this water.

Thin ice

It's reported that the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of collapse and a paper in Nature [1] offers clear evidence that Antactica is warming in step with the rest of the world (BBC, NYT) [2].

Wally Broecker's climate "monster" may be stirring [3].

Barry Lopez wrote Arctic Dreams before present rapid changes in the Polar climates were well understood. [4] But Lopez was haunted by unease at the role of industrial man, alluding to the Eskimo terms ilira, fear that accompanies awe, and kappia, fear in the face of unpredictable violence.

As late as the early industrial period (the early nineteenth century), creatures such as the Greenland right or Bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) still resonated with something of the monstrous that had fascinated and appalled earlier Europeans.

A month before she entered Lancaster Sound in 1823, the [British whaler] Cumbrian killed a huge Greenland right [whale], a 57 foot female, in Davis Strait. They came upon her while she was asleep in light ice. Awakened by their approach, she swam slowly once around the ship and then put her head calmly to its bow and began to push. She pushed the ship backward for two minutes before the transfixed crew reacted with harpoons. The incident left the men unsettled. They flinched against such occasional eeriness in their work. [5]

But, Lopez shows, when you pay attention to the remarkable nature of this animal it is men's actions towards them that now seem monstrous:

The skin of [the Greenland right whale] is slightly furrowed to the touch, like coarse-laid paper, and is a velvet black color softened by gray. Under the chin and on the belly the skin turns white. Its dark brown eyes, the size of an ox's, are nearly lost in the huge head. Its blowhole rises prominently, with the shape of a volcano, allowing the whale to surface in narrow cracks in the sea ice to breathe. It is so sensitive to touch that at a bird's footfall a whale asleep at the surface will start wildly. The fiery pain of a harpoon strike can hardly be imagined. (In 1856, a harpooner on the Truelove reported a whale that dived so furiously it took out 1200 yards of line in three and a half minutes before crashing into the ocean floor, breaking is neck and burying its head eight feet deep in the blue black mud.) [6]

Today our "monsters" lurk elsewhere. Ilira kappia stabs us not from behind but from within our own shadows.

Footnotes

1. Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 by Eric Steig et al (doi:10.1038/nature07669). In State of Antarctica: red or blue? at Realclimate, two of the authors try to pre-empt misinterpretation.

2. (Added 27 Jan) Melting ice could push Emperor penguins to extinction

3. See also Attribution of polar warming to human influence by Nathan P. Gillett et al (doi:10.1038/ngeo338).

4. The discovery in 1985 of the "ozone hole" above Antarctica shocked many people into increased awareness of the potential of human activity to substantially affect whole earth systems on a short time scale. It helped pave the way for greater acceptance of the case for anthropogenic global warming. (See Breaking into politics 1980-88 in The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart). Arctic Dreams was published in 1986. I have recently gone back to if for the first time in many years thanks, in part, to a prompt by JML.

5. From the prologue of Arctic Dreams. In Waiting for Salmon (2006), Lopez writes of the fury of many of his compatriots at the idea that nature is anything but a warehouse to be emptied prior to a rapturous departure:

To speak of large-scale changes in the natural world that might be traced to human activity is anathema to people still furious at Darwin for suggesting that 'nature' included man...[In] America, mainstream politics is uninformed by, event hostile to, biology.

6. Lopez quotes the Canadian historian W. Gillies Ross as 'cautiously' suggesting that as many as 38,000 Greenland right whales may have been killed in the Davis Strait fishery, largely by the British fleet. 'A sound estimate of the size of the population today [1986] is 200.' 90% of the indigenous human population may also have died as a result of European incursion and infectious diseases.

When we dead awaken

Broecker's beast stirs?

Cold stars

Starfish, South Orkney -- from a gallery of photographs illustrating the first comprehensive "inventory" of sea and land animals around a group of Antarctic islands.

Remembered hills

At 500 million years old, [the Gamburtsevs] may not be the oldest mountains on the planet, but they likely are the tallest of the ancient mountains still in existence.

-- notes Matt Kaplan with reference to work by Tina Van de Flierdt et al.

An earlier post asked if life might come back to the Gamburtsevs in a warmer world. At the time, I was not aware of research pointing to their age. But if they really are about 500 million years old, then it seems almost certain that they have been inhabited by organisms larger than microbes before now.

Hath spied an icy fish

Megaleledone setebos lives in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. It is one of the 'new' species described in the Census of Marine Life.

Unlocked

Scientists are exploring the Gamburtsevs -- 'ghost' mountains of undetermined age that have been buried far beneath the Antarctic ice for perhaps 15 million years [1].

55.8 million years ago, at the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), the average annual temperature at both poles was 10 to 20 °C. The Arctic ocean warmed to over 22°C in summer. Antarctica was not only ice-free but warm.

Atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are probably faster at present than a any time since the PETM. Unlike 56 million years ago, however, Antarctica is separated from other continents, and this (as well as other significant differences) means the consequences of today's rise are unlikely to play out the same way. So how will Antarctica change this time? How many existing life forms will be eliminated? What will replace them? Could life come to the Gamburtsevs, and would it be for the first time since they came into existence?

P.S. From the other end of the planet, dramatic footage of Sermeq Kujalleq, the world's fastest glacier. (And, 17 Oct: Arctic air temperatures hit record highs)

Footnote:

[1] See Paradise Lost, Book II:

Far off from these, a slow and silent stream,
Lethe, the river of oblivion, rolls
Her watery labyrinth, whereof who drinks
Forthwith his former state and being forgets--
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
Beyond this flood a frozen continent
Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms
Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land
Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems
Of ancient pile; all else deep snow and ice