Ancient 40,000-year-old organisms hidden beneath the Arctic could damage the Earth

Ancient organisms have been hidden beneath the Arctic for over 40,000 years... until now.

To undertake this investigation, lead author Tristan Caro from the University of Colorado Boulder and his team travelled to the Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility in central Alaska.

It is here where they accessed the permafrost 350 feet deep (and for those wondering what permafrost is, it's made up of soil, ice and rocks where there are also animal and plant remains frozen in time, as well as bacteria and other microorganisms.

The team could even see bones of ancient bison and mammoth sticking out from the walls.

“The first thing you notice when you walk in there is that it smells really bad. It smells like a musty basement that’s been left to sit for way too long,” Caro, currently a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology, said in a press release. “To a microbiologist, that’s very exciting because interesting smells are often microbial.”

The team of researchers drilled for samples from the walls of the Permafrost Tunnel.Tristan Caro/University of Colorado Boulder

From there, they collected permafrost up to 40,000 years old from the walls of the tunnel. The next step was to water to the samples and incubate them at 39 and 54 degrees Fahrenheit - that's pretty warm for the Arctic standards.

“We wanted to simulate what happens in an Alaskan summer, under future climate conditions where these temperatures reach deeper areas of the permafrost,” Caro detailed.

Fears of climate change consequences

There are concerns about permafrost thawing as a result of global warming as the microbes would wake up, and there's a possibility that they would expel greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

Sebastian Kopf, professor of geological sciences at CU Boulder and study co-author, noted how it is "one of the biggest unknowns in climate responses."

“How will the thawing of all this frozen ground, where we know there’s tons of carbon stored, affect the ecology of these regions and the rate of climate change?”

What did the researchers find?

That's why this particular study is important, as they found that when the permafrost is thawed, although it takes some time for the microbes to become active, within a few months they can create colonies (ones that probably wouldn't infect people but should be kept sealed away nevertheless).

The permafrost started out by replacing only about one in every 100,000 cells per day in these first few months, but then at the six-month point, they were active, with some bacterial colonies producing gooey structures called “biofilms” that you can see with the naked eye.

“These are not dead samples by any means,” explained Caro. “They’re still very much capable of hosting robust life that can break down organic matter and release it as carbon dioxide."

They also found that hotter temperatures didn't wake up the bacterial colonies any quicker, meaning it could up a number of months after a heatwave for microbes to then become active to the point they're emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gases.

What does this mean about climate change?

Well, those fears about climate change thawing permafrost and waking up microbes aren't unfounded, given this recent research.

Basically, longer Arctic summers will increase this risk.

“You might have a single hot day in the Alaskan summer, but what matters much more is the lengthening of the summer season to where these warm temperatures extend into the autumn and spring,” Caro said.

But more investigation and research need to be done with permafrost located in different areas of the world to see if it's the same result for other ancient organisms.

“There’s so much permafrost in the world—in Alaska, Siberia and in other northern cold regions,” Caro said. “We’ve only sampled one tiny slice of that.”

Elsewhere from Indy100, Scientists discover strange modern structures on the Arctic seafloor, and How the Arctic will look by 2100 if climate change continues.

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