Word: mikucki
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...team of researchers, including Ann Pearson of Harvard and Jill Mikucki of Dartmouth, was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and Harvard’s Microbial Sciences Initiative...
Pearson said Mikucki would camp out by the falls for weeks at a time for a number of years, waiting for the sporadic melting events during the summer when it would be just warm enough for the glacier to melt and for brine to flow...
Further research on these microbes is being conducted by Jill Mikucki, a research associate in the Department of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth...
...trick, she found, was that they learned how to change their diet. When Mikucki studied the organisms' DNA and energy-processing systems, she found that they were indeed descended from species that once lived in the open ocean. Underneath the ice, they were deprived of light to run photosynthesis, and instead they relied on what they found around them - principally sulfur and iron - to generate energy. The genes responsible for that alternative metabolism are also found in other marine organisms but they're less important to those species because the oceans provide more options for food...
...Mikucki refers to the subglacial pond as "a unique sort of time capsule from a period in Earth's history," but it also has lessons for scientists studying Mars, an entire planet that is in many ways a time capsule too. Mars, like Antarctica, was once warm and wet, but the slow loss of its atmosphere also meant the loss of much of its moisture and surface heat. Still, the place was warm and wet long enough for life to have taken hold - life that would have then had to retreat into underground water deposits and make the same kind...