Glaciers Are Not Devoid of Life. Tons of Microbes Hide Within The Ice.

Glaciers in the Arctic are not nearly as devoid of life as they might appear at first sight.
In fact, carpets of ice and snow in Greenland and Iceland are practically crawling with microscopic life forms.
Like seasonal zombies, many of these organisms lie dormant in winter, waking from their frozen slumber only with the summer melt.
"A small puddle of meltwater on a glacier can easily have 4,000 different species living in it," says microbiologist Alexandre Anesio from Aarhus University in Sweden.
"They live on bacteria, algae, viruses, and microscopic fungi. It's a whole ecosystem that we never knew existed until recently."
When researchers tested the ice and snow at two glaciers in the mid-to-late summer, one in Iceland and the other in Greenland, more than half the bacteria they found were active.
The rest were dormant or dead.
Glaciers Are Not Devoid of Life. Tons of Microbes Hide Within The Ice.