ByDavid Bressan,
Senior Contributor.
In a new study, a team of geologists and biologists led by the University of Colorado at Boulder resurrected ancient microbes that had been trapped in ice — in some cases for around 40,000 years.
The researchers traveled to Fox, Alaska, where the U.S. Army Corps maintains a a 350 feet deep tunnel to study engineering problems associated with permafrost — a frozen mix of organic debris, ice and rocks that underlies nearly a quarter of the land in the northern hemisphere.
They collected samples of permafrost that was a few thousand to tens of thousands of years old from the walls of the tunnel. They then added water and incubated them at temperatures of 39 and 54 degrees Fahrenheit, far above the mean temperature of permafrost hoovering around 14 degrees Fahrenheit.
