Antarctic moss revived after 1,500 years of cryopreservation

If you thought Captain America’s revival after spending time as a “Capsicle” was pretty impressive, wait ‘til you see this.
 

A team of researchers from the United Kingdom have succeeded in reviving Antarctic moss that had been frozen for more than 1,500 years. The moss was extracted from a glacier-covered island in the Antarctic Peninsula known as Signy Island, located offshore in the Drake Passage. 

A pretty 'cool' experiment

According to study co-author Peter Convey, an ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey, the experiment marks “the very first instance we have of any plant or animal surviving [being frozen] for more than a couple of decades.” While microbes and plant genetic material have already been resurrected from 20,000-year old Siberian permafrost, this new breakthrough is the first solid evidence of creatures surviving past twenty years sans water or warmth.

When Convey and his companions saw that old moss extracted from the frosty layers on the island showed no signs of decaying into brown peat (decaying organic matter), they immediately set to work. After punching holes into the frozen soil under the still-living moss to gather more soil, ice, and plants, the samples that they obtained were immediately wrapped in plastic and shipped to a lab in Britain.

After slicing up the samples' core, the researchers used an incubator to grow new moss directly from the preserved shoots. The team then proceeded to run carbon-dating tests on the samples, putting the oldest moss in the core somewhere between 1,697 and 1,533 years old. In comparison, the oldest frozen mosses in Antarctica are about 5,000 years old.

“If you look at these cores [from Signy Island], the base is very well-preserved,” Convey said. “They've got a very nice set of shoots."

Interestingly, new shoots emerged from the moss's rootlike "rhizoids." The researchers believe that the samples were not contaminated by spores from outside; apart from the fact that the shoots grew directly from the preserved moss, the shoots were also verified to be of the same species.

"We can't be certain there is no contamination, but we have very strong circumstantial evidence," explained Convey, whose paper was recently published in the online science journal Current Biology. "Under a microscope, you can see the new shoot growing out of the old shoot. It is very firmly connected."

Just 'chilling'

Bears, bugs, and even sea leeches have demonstrated different ways of surviving the cold. Plants, on the other hand, have no choice but to simply endure harsh temperatures.

In the case of Antarctic moss (as well as the other insects and wildlife that live nearby), recent studies have suggested that Antarctica's volcanoes actually generate enough heat to allow the continent's denizens to survive the planet's frosty weather spells. 

The researchers also observed that, if mosses were blanketed by glaciers during an extended ice age, the potential for longer cryopreservation would be greater. However, it's probably not that much of a stretch that Antarctic moss – which is essentially sustained by the droppings of the numerous birds that populate the area – managed to survive being frozen for so long.

On the bright side, Steve Rogers probably didn't have to silently endure decades of helplessly watching penguins poop on him. — TJD, GMA News