Most things die after a few hundred thousand years, but not everything.
Many bacteria, viruses and fungi can survive in ice. Some species have gone frozen and unseen for ages, according to Scott Rogers, who heads University research on these ancient organisms.
After studying ice from Greenland and Antarctica, Rogers, the new chair of the University’s biology department, is trying to gather Himalayan ice. With it, he hopes to find an explanation for influenza, or flu, viruses that seem to vanish from the Earth only to return years later.
“Some strains of influenza seem to disappear for ages and come back,” he said. “And a lot of influenza comes from Asia.”
Through his and his team’s research, Rogers has developed a theory called “genome recycling” that would explain this phenomenon.
According to the theory, wind drops tiny organisms on glaciers. Over several thousand years, layers of ice pack the frozen life form farther and farther into the glacier. As the ice mass moves, its front will slowly melt, eventually exposing the organism, unfreezing it. Such a cycle can take more than a million years.
The effects of the newly freed organisms spread from there, Rogers said. “Once they melt they mix with modern populations.”
And microorganisms and modern populations don’t always mix well. When two of Rogers’ colleagues were in the Caribbean 15 years ago, they avoided the area’s notorious water. They did, however, use ice cubes. And they got sick.
It got Rogers and his associates thinking: “If they survive in those conditions, they could probably survive in ice elsewhere.”
That day, the travelers learned to avoid Caribbean ice as well as water. As for the future, there is still much learning to do.
“We came up with genome recycling about two years ago,” he said. “But we could be studying it for another 20 years.”
Rogers started studying ancient ice organisms in 1994, and some of his colleagues have been studying them for over a decade. The rest of his peers, however, are just now catching on, he said.
While plenty of scientists study ice for information on global warming patterns, few searched for life frozen inside. Interest is spreading, he said, citing a successful turnout at a recent workshop on the subject and other similar events.
“It’s taken a while, but after 10 years, (the scientific community is) getting more and more interested,” Rogers said.
Among the interested is NASA, he added. “They’ve been looking for life in subterranean ice on Mars, and they want to know how a probe could look for signs of life.”
Discovering new organisms could be good for medicine, too, he said. “We could find some new bacteria or fungi that could produce antibiotics.”
But no matter what comes from the research, discovery alone is enough to keep Rogers happy.
“From the scientist’s standpoint, finding anything new is interesting,” he said.
