Word: mikucki
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...team led by microbiologist Jill Mikucki of Dartmouth College, set out to look for any such hangers-on at a particularly unforgiving place: Blood Falls, on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Blood Falls got its unlovely name due to red staining that comes from a snout on the Taylor Glacier - the result of heavy deposits of iron in its water. In ages past, a fjord ran through the area and brought with it swarms of marine life, but more than 1.5 million years ago the ice began to rise, and a pool of seawater became trapped - and then capped - creating...
...Mikucki and her group began sampling water that runs from deep within the glacier - which warms just enough in the Antarctic summer that it melts. Freed up after 1,500 millennia of absolute blackness and utter cold, the water at first seemed completely sterile. "When I started running chemical analysis on it," says Mikucki, "there was no oxygen...
...What there was, however, was life. The samples Mikucki collected did not teem with a riot of different microbial species the way ocean water does, but there was at least one species, thriving and dividing and doing all of the other things single-celled species do. "How [were] they able to persist below hundreds of meters of ice and live in permanently cold and dark conditions over hundreds of millions of years?" Mickucki asks...