music
ambience: Glacier Melt
It’s the highest continent in the world, and one of the last unexplored regions on Earth. Until recently, it was considered a polar desert – a virtual dead zone. Well, that view has radically changed and now scientists have new appreciation for Antarctica. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
“First time I flew over and looked out the airplane window and you just see this massive white from horizon to horizon. It’s just massive block of ice, and you know it’s several miles thick. And so, I was just kind of awestruck that, wow, here’s this huge part of our Earth that has no life in it… and I think a lot of people think that.”
John Priscu is with the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences at Montana State University in Bozeman.
“And after about 15 years of research, and especially when we started working with these deep ice cores and we started seeing microorganisms in them, my views changed considerably. And, as a matter of fact, I’ve written several papers calling it “life in the continent of the dead.” We now know that there are microorganisms all through the ice sheet. In some recent calculations we did, we were able to show that the Antarctic ice sheet and sub-glacial lakes contain as much bacteria as all the world’s surface fresh waters – meaning all the lakes and streams. So, now we have this big ice block, right? Seventy percent of the world’s fresh water is tied up as water ice in Antarctica. That’s a big reservoir of water, and until just recently – I mean, like, in the last year or two – no one thought it contained life. And now we’re finding it, and we’re trying to push the story that, hey, this ice sheet’s alive, and it could be very important in climate. It could be very important in evolution of organisms on Earth and important for our understanding of how life lives in extreme environments.”
We’ll hear more on Antarctica in future programs. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.
music