Ancient creatures are waking up after 40,000 years on Permafrost

Approximately 400 years ago there was a great cold wave that hit the entire globe. The ice hit Ellesmere Island in Canada, and froze a tuft of moss.

Since that time the plant has been frozen in a layer of ice of 30 centimeters in the teardrop glacier.

Evolutionary biologist Catherine La Farge arrived centuries later, in the melting of the teardrop, to finally find a tuft of the species Aulacomnium turgidum already free from its “time chamber”.

The moss was faded and torn, but it still had a green appearance — an encouraging sign of life.

The researcher then took several of these samples to her laboratory in Edmonton, where she replanted them in fertile soil. Several of these samples fell through the soil with shoots and leaves.

It is not very easy to survive frozen. Irregular ice crystals can destroy cell membranes and other fundamental biological parts. Many plants and animals simply succumb to the cold in early winter, leaving their seeds or eggs for a new generation to emerge in the spring.

Mosses, in turn, found a way to survive this petrifying cold. They simply dry out when temperatures drop, so they can prevent ice crystals from developing in your tissues. But if their structures suffer damage, their cells can divide and replace any type of tissue that makes up the moss. It is similar to what happens with change cells.

“Thanks to these adaptations, mosses are more likely than other plants to survive long-term freezing,” said Peter Convey, an ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey.

On the heels of the Canadian moss rebirth, Convey’s team announced that it had awakened a 1,500-year-old moss buried more than a meter deep in the Antarctic permafrost.

Convey and his team announced that they had woken up 1,500-year-old moss that had been buried more than a meter below the frozen Antarctic soil. (P. Boelen / BAS)

“The permafrost environment is very stable,” said Convey, noting that permanently frozen soil can isolate moss from surface-level stresses, such as annual freeze-thaw cycles or harmful DNA radiation.

The archaic mosses discovered by La Farge and Convey are notable, but there is a much older group of ice age survivors.

University of Tennessee microbiologist Tatiana Vishnivetskaya drills deep into Siberian permafrost to study single-celled organisms that flourished on ice ages ago.

She also managed to bring a million-year-old bacterium back to life in a petri dish. “They look very similar to the bacteria that you can find in cold environments today,” she said.

But it doesn’t stop there, last year, Vishnivetskaya’s team announced an “accidental discovery” — a structure with nervous and digestive systems, that’s right, you didn’t read it wrong — that destroyed scientists’ understanding of extreme resistance.

As usual, scientists were looking for simple single-cell structures — the only ones they thought could survive frozen for millennia.

They put the microorganisms in petri dishes and noticed something very strange. Among common bacteria and amoebae, there were nematodes — long worms with heads on one end and anus on the other.

These are the most complex creatures that anyone has ever revived after a long freeze.

The researcher estimates that the nematode is about 41,000 years old. This same worm lived on the ground at the same time as the Neanderthals and survived to meet modern humans in the Vishnivetskaya high-tech laboratory.

If these creatures survived for forty thousand frozen years, how many more millennia could they withstand in freezing? Or that other fantastic creatures could literally be frozen in time? Science as yet does not have an exact answer to that question, but it is an incredible discovery anyway.

The scientific article “Regeneration of Little Ice Age bryophytes emerging from a polar glacier with implications of totipotency in extreme environments” was published in the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), you can access or download it here.

The scientific article “Millennial timescale regeneration in a moss from Antarctica” was published in Science Direct, you can access it here.

The scientific article “Viable Nematodes from Late Pleistocene Permafrost of the Kolyma River Lowland” was published on the Springer platform, you can access it here.