New Scientist
Image: NASA Goddard Photo and Video
Wind the clock back 5 million years, to a blustery day in the dry season somewhere in Africa. The winds whip dust high up into the atmosphere, then blow it south and dump it in Antarctica. As fresh snow falls, a small piece of prehistoric Africa gets locked away in the ice. It carries an invisible cargo: thousands of tiny microbes have survived the journey.
When their burial chamber is opened, it’s because humans have arrived, keen to probe the continent’s secrets. They drill into the ice, extract a dirt-speckled layer, melt it and incubate the water in a darkened corner of their lab. Months later, something amazing happens: the ancient microbes begin to grow.
The man who led this astonishing feat of resurrection was Paul Falkowski at Rutgers University in New Jersey. His microbes were frozen at a time when our earliest ancestors had barely separated from those of chimpanzees. It isn’t the first story of its kind. The oldest “resurrection” claim so far came in 2000, when a team said they had revived microbes found inside a 250-million-year-old salt crystal from the Salado formation in New Mexico. Lazarus microbes aren’t just fascinating oddities. By inhabiting a twilight zone between life and death, they offer a unique opportunity to probe the very nature of life itself. Read more on newscientist.com…
