A survivor in Greenland: A novel bacterial species is found trapped in 120,000-year-old ice
A scanning electron microscope image of the Chryseobacterium greenlandensis bacteria found in a Greenland glacier. A team of Penn State scientists has discovered a new ultra-small species of bacteria that has survived for more than 120,000 years within the ice of a Greenland glacier at a depth of nearly two miles. The microorganism's ability to persist in this low-temperature, high-pressure, reduced-oxygen, and nutrient-poor habitat makes it particularly useful for studying how life, in general, can survive in a variety of extreme environments on Earth and possibly elsewhere in the solar system. The work will be presented by Jennifer Loveland-Curtze, a senior research associate in the laboratory led by Jean Brenchley, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Penn State, at the 108th American Society for Microbiology General Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts on 3 June 2008 at 10:30 a.m. (Extreme Environments-I, poster N-156).