Ultimate survivors
SCIENTISTS say there is life in the lakes of Antarctica which are perpetually covered by ice. An expedition to the McMurdo Dry Valleys led by John Priscu, a microbial ecologist from the Montana State University, USA, to investigate whatever life forms exist in the Antarctic waters turned out to be arduous, but the findings more than paid the price of labour.
As Priscu and his colleagues began drilling into the tO to 20-feet-thick layers of ice during their successive trips to Antarctica, they kept hitting a mysterious layer of gravel about six feet down. The irksome debris, which sent their tempers flying, however, turned out to be a place where diverse colonies of microbial life lived in little oases. Here, for about 150 days each summer, the ice softens enough and tiny pockets of liquid water form. The temperature in this coldest desert on Earth, when the microbes are active, is 0