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Scientists had believed that Lake Vostok, which is buried under a glacier in Antarctica, and is so dark, deep and cold that it was a place which was totally uninhabitable.
But Dr. Scott Rogers, a Bowling Green State University professor of biological sciences, and his colleagues has revealed a surprising variety of life forms living and reproducing in this most extreme of environments.
Their findings details the thousands of species they identified through DNA and RNA sequencing.
Few nutrients are available inside the lake. The lake lies far below sea level in a depression that formed 60 million years ago when the continental plates shifted and cracked. The weather there is so harsh and unpredictable that scientists visiting must have special gear and take survival training.
Working with core sections removed from the deep layer of ice that accreted from lake water that froze onto the bottom of the glacier where it meets the lake, Rogers examined ice as clear as diamonds that formed in the great pressure and relatively warm temperatures found at that depth. The team sampled cores from two areas of the lake, the southern main basin and near an embayment on the southwestern end of the lake.
By sequencing the DNA and RNA from the accretion ice samples, the team identified thousands of bacteria, including some that are commonly found in the digestive systems of fish, crustaceans and annelid worms, in addition to fungi and two species of archaea, or single-celled organisms that tend to live in extreme environments.
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United States