Researchers taking samples at the meltwater ponds in Antarctica. Photo: Supplied/ University of Waikato
A group of New Zealand polar scientists have helped uncover clues to life's survival during the global ice age. Some of their research used samples collected by Robert Scott's Antarctica expeditions.
Researchers from the University of Waikato were part of an international team - including scientists from MIT, the Natural History Museum and Cardiff University - which examined meltwater ponds on Antarctica's McMurdo Ice Shelf.
They concluded that similar ponds could have offered refuge to early complex life when the planet was locked in ice more than 700 million years ago.
Frozen ponds on Antarctica's McMurdo Ice Shelf Photo: Supplied/ University of Waikato
Waikato science professor Dr Ian Hawes, one of the New Zealand's leading polar scientists who has studied Antarctica for four decades, said its harsh and otherworldly climate provided a glimpse into the simple microscopic communities that dominated Earth for much of its history.
"Antarctica is one of the most extreme environments on Earth and it's the least-like the environment that we are used to living in and [thriving] in. It's also a place where complex life doesn't do very well."
However it was the sort of place that some "very simple multi cell organisms, which are super hardy and can tolerate incredibly harsh conditions" could survive in, he added.
A high biomass of cyanobacteria was found to dominate the microbial mat in a meltwater pond the team looked at, in Antarctica. Photo: Supplied/ University of Waikato
Antarctica also offered a glimpse into what life on other planets might be like, Hawes said. "It's like looking at a different place... a different planet or what our planet looked like a long time ago. So it's kind of the closest we can get to studying non-Earth-like life on Earth itself."
Hawes said analysing samples collected during early expeditions to Antarctica, as part of an international research project, was "an emotional experience".
A colleague at the Natural History Museum found biological samples from meltwater ponds on Antarctica's McMurdo Ice Shelf taken by explorer Robert Scott's expedition team "in a drawer, wrapped in brown paper... and she worked out what they were".
"They [Scott's team] collected samples way back in 1906, or 1907 and dried them, and preserved them. So we sampled them, we extracted the DNA, we fingerprinted the organisms that were there, and then we went back, as close as we could to the environment described in Scott's journal, and we [re-collected] those samples and did the same thing with those fresh samples."
Professor Ian Hawes of the University of Waikato. Photo: Supplied/ University of Waikato
For someone who had spent decades studying Antarctica it was "quite an emotional experience, to go into the Natural History Museum and see slides, preparations with handwritten notes which are written by some of the people who you've only ever read about."
"To think that [biologist] James Murray collected these samples and put them on this slide ... it's quite an emotional thing for us to have that very real connection back to people who did what we do, but under really different conditions."
The findings have been published as a new international paper in Nature Communications.
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