Scientists revive frozen plants after 400 years

Frozen plants that were buried under a glacier in Canada have been exposed after substantial ice melt, and researchers from the University of Alberta say they are sprouting new growth.

The mosses, known as bryophytes, were frozen during the Little Ice Age that occurred between 1550 and 1850 in the Northern Hemisphere. The glaciers formed during this period retreated slowly through the twentieth century, but since 2004, ice melt has accelerated sharply at about 3-4 meters per year.

Researchers explored the Teardrop Glacier and found the bryophytes along its edges. The desiccated plants were mostly black, but then they "saw these huge populations coming out from underneath the glacier that seemed to have a greenish tint," said Catherine La Farge, lead author of the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bryophytes are already known for being able to survive desiccation during Arctic winters, returning to grow the next warm season. This is due in part to their cells' ability to dedifferentiate, or lose their specialized function, and return to a stem-cell-like starting state, allowing them to regrow.

La Farge was surprised by regrowth after so many years, though. It was previously thought that vegetation simply moved into dead spaces left by ice cover, but the authors find that many frozen species -- including some completely new to science -- are coming back to life.

"It's a whole world of what's coming out from underneath the glaciers that really needs to be studied," La Farge said.

Bryophytes are not thoroughly understood, and they play an important role in the land plant ecosystem of the extreme Arctic environment. Such plants are are often candidates for cultivation in extraterrestrial environments, including Mars.

Scientists have already cultivated moss in space, and found it grows in a non-random spiral in micro-gravity. "Maybe astronauts would want to take bryophytes to other planets to see if they would grow and how they could modify extraterrestrial landscapes," La Farge told io9.