Word: watered
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...fact that organisms can survive in extreme - seemingly lethal - conditions is nothing new. Researchers have found creatures living at boiling vents on the floor of the ocean, in desert sands that virtually never see water; fossilized remains of microorganisms have even been found inside of rocks. Antarctic life, however, has always been a more complex matter. Antarctica was once a warmer, wetter land than it is now, but continental migration pushed it from place to place, leaving it - for the current epoch at least - at the bottom of the planet, where it became little more than a frozen desert...
...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 a huge, salty deposit buried hundreds of yards beneath the glaciers...
...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...
...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 of hurry-up adaptation Mikucki's microbes did. Similar adaptive metabolism could be in evidence on the Jovian moon Europa, where a layer of surface ice may cover a globe-girdling ocean. (See pictures of Mars' patterns...