Life Under Greenland Ice Sheet?

dimensionless

What are your thoughts? Do you think there is any there? Have we already contaminated it by drilling through the ice?

paralith

Considering the vast amount of life found underneath anatartic ice sheets that melted away, I would say yes, most likely there is life there. And introduction of sunlight will probably start to effect it.

http://www.newscientist.com/article....mg18725096.100

dimensionless

I was imagining bacteria living in a two-dimensional world between the ice sheet and the ground. Maybe underground as well.

While I'm talking about ice sheets and Antarctica, it looks like there might be some interesting things going on underneath that ice sheet as well.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4908292.stm

iansmith

There a few research lab in Canada that are exploring microbial diversity in permafrost in the Canadian high arctic.

For example:
http://nrs-micro.mcgill.ca/whyte/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...=pubmed_docsum

Most microbial life would be in a suspended state or be able to replicate at fairly low rate in temperature below the freezing point. thus it is likely that life could be found under the ice sheet.

matthyaouw

That depends on the glacier. Some areas of ice in Greenland and Antarctica are polythermal, with basal melting occurring in some places, as well as the possibility for some input of liquid water from above.

I'd guess these places would be where to look to find life.

dimensionless

I guess I was hypothesizing that there would be a very thin layer of water between the ice sheet and the ground. Presumably at some depth below ground it would not be permafrost, although this is not what I was thinking of. It might still be interesting though. On the other hand, I'm not sure that biology knows that much about what it growing 1 km below ground in the tropics.