AGAINST all odds, living organisms should be able to survive deep beneath the Antarctic ice, a physicist in California has predicted. He thinks that bacteria can survive in thin veins of water that form between ice crystals, despite the darkness, crushing pressure and temperatures well below freezing.
Traces of bacteria have been found in ice cores from above Lake Vostok, a glacier-covered crescent of water near the South Pole-but these were assumed to be dead organisms that had been trapped in the ice. Then researchers from the University of Hawaii managed to revive some bacteria after thawing the cores, suggesting that the microbes may merely have been dormant, according to John Priscu of Montana State University in Bozeman, who helped find the bugs (
Now Buford Price, a physicist ...
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