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Saturday, June 8, 2013
SCIENCE
Freed from a glacier’s hold,
ancient moss grows again
The glacier is now
retreating, exposing
the mosses to air
and sunlight for the
first time in centuries,
and they are growing
green and healthy
once more
NYT SYNDICATE
IN one of nature’s more astonishing
never-say-die stories, clumps
of frozen mosses that were entombed
beneath an advancing
glacier more than 400 years ago
have revived.
The glacier is now retreating, exposing
the mosses to air and sunlight for
the first time in centuries, and they are
growing green and healthy once more.
The discovery was made by a team
of researchers from the University of
Alberta who were conducting a biodiversity
study of mosses and vascular plants
in an area around the retreating Teardrop
Glacier in the central mountains of
Canada’s remote Ellesmere Island.
“As we walked up to the edge of the
glacier, we could see patches of mosses
The Tear Drop Glacier in Nunavut.
that seemed to be coming out from underneath
the ice,’’ recalled project leader
Catherine La Farge.
“They were blackened, but there were
also tints of green in there as well. As I
looked more closely I thought, ‘Oh my
gosh, what’s this? Either this has somehow
managed to retain a vestige of its
original colour or it’s just started to grow
again after centuries under the ice.’ The
thought of that just blew my mind.’’
A laboratory culture of moss brought back to life after 400 years beneath a glacier.
Moss, Interrupted
Back at the laboratory in Edmonton,
a microscope confirmed what the human
eye suspected: The desiccated centuries-old
mosses had indeed come back
to life and were sprouting tiny shoots
after many, many years buried beneath
thousands of tons of ice. Just how many?
Radiocarbon dating revealed the specimens
to be in the range of 400 to 600
years old.
Intrigued, La Farge and her team
ground up stem and leaf tissue from
some of the samples they had collected,
placed them in petri dishes filled with
nutrient-rich potting soil, and waited
to see what happened. Sure enough,
about six weeks later a telltale green
tinge could be seen emerging from
the soil. The researchers were ultimately
able to propagate four different
species of mosses from seven potted
samples.
A year later the regenerated mosses
are still growing, essentially resuming
lives that had been interrupted long
ago by the advancing glaciers of the
so-called “mini Ice Age,’’ a global
cooling period that began around the
year 1550 and lasted until 1850. The
mosses’ ability to regenerate after so
much time under the ice, and so swiftly
– for the ground had been uncovered
for not much more than a year – is
giving scientists insights into how an
ecosystem can rebound as an ice sheet
retreats.
Ancient Survivors
Of course, mosses have always been
some of nature’s true survivors. Belonging
to an ancient group of plants called
bryophytes – which also includes liverworts
and hornworts – they date back
more than 400 million years to the dawn
of terrestrial life on the planet.
They not only possess the ability
to shut down in lean times and revive
themselves later when conditions improve,
says La Farge, but their cells can
also behave very much like stem cells so
that any one cell can “clone’’ or regenerate
the plant. The centuries-old mosses,
now flourishing in a lab in Edmonton,
and their wild cousins sprouting along
the foot of the Teardrop Glacier, are
by no means the oldest plants to have
been regenerated in the 21st century.
Last year researchers in Siberia successfully
germinated ancient seeds of the
narrow-leafed campion flower (Silene
stenophylla), found well preserved deep
in the permafrost – at the ripe old age of
31,800 years.
Germinating those Siberian flower
seeds required quite a bit of high-tech
human intervention, Le Farge explained.
Scientists had to extract the placenta
from the seeds, then artificially coax
them to life. Not so the humble mosses
found along the edge of Teardrop Glacier,
buried for centuries beneath the ice.
They required no special techniques at
all, needing little more than potting soil
and a gardener’s TLC.