A community of rock-chewing microbes are thriving in a submerged lake some 2,600 feet under the Antarctic ice, researchers confirmed this week.
The discovery gives some hope to scientists who believe life could still be prowling under the surface of Mars.
Lake Whillans is buried under 2,640 feet of ice, according to UPI.com. It is mainly fed by the lower portion of the Whillans Ice Stream in West Antarctica, but is part of a vast subglacial drainage network that researchers now know supports life.
The team located a "diverse microbial community" of at least 3,931 different species or groups of species, "many members of which can mine rocks for energy and use carbon dioxide as their source of carbon."
"Given that more than 400 subglacial lakes and numerous rivers and streams are thought to exist beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, such ecosystems may be widespread," said the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the project dubbed Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD), according to AFP.
Though it is fed ice from above, the lake is made possible due to geothermal heating from below, according to the new study.
Researchers made similar discoveries 20 years ago in another subglacial lake. But the scientists then didn't go looking for life, and since their microorganism-containing samples had melted and were later refrozen, the legitimacy of their discovery was questioned.
"People weren't really thinking about ecosystems underneath the ice," Louisiana State University biologist Brent Christner said to Discovery News. "The conventional wisdom was that they don't exist, it's a place that's too extreme for this kind of thing,"
Most of the species discovered, including the rock-eating bacteria, get their energy from inorganic compounds like ammonium, nitrate, and others.
"The action of the ice sheet pulverises the rock bed, and the mineral particles then go into the water where they become available for chemical and biological alteration," Christner said to BBC News.
The researchers found that 87 percent of the microorganisms were related to bacteria and 3.6 percent to single-celled organisms called Archaea.
Around 800 of the organisms could not be classified.
"The latest WISSARD announcement is the first to provide definitive evidence that a functional microbial ecosystem exists beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, confirming more than a decade of speculation about life in this environment," said an NSF statement.
Research was outlined in the latest issue of the journal Nature this week.
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