Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Thursday, August 21, 2014
Cold, Dark and Alive! Life Discovered in Buried Antarctic Lake
Antarctica, the coldest place on Earth, teems with microscopic life.
Tiny organisms dwell on the ice and live inside glaciers, and now,
researchers confirm, a rich microbial ecosystem persists underneath the
thick ice sheet, where no sunlight has been felt for millions of years. Nearly 4,000 species of microbes inhabit Lake Whillans,
which lies beneath 2,625 feet (800 meters) of ice in West Antarctica,
researchers report today (Aug. 20) in the journal Nature. These are the
first organisms ever retrieved from a subglacial Antarctic lake. "We found not just that things are alive, but that there's an active
ecosystem," said lead study author Brent Christner, a microbiologist at
Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. "If you had to think up what would be the coolest scenario for an ecosystem in Antarctica, you couldn't make this up." [See Photos of Lake Whillans' Drilling Project & Microbial Life] Antarctica has nearly 400 lakes trapped under its ice sheet. Some of
them — like Lake Whillans — are connected by rivers and streams. Others
are deep, isolated basins like Lake Vostok,
where drillers have yet to successfully recover uncontaminated water
samples. The new Lake Whillans discovery raises scientists' hopes that
these other hidden waterways also carry life. Drillers broke through to Lake Whillans
in January 2013, after years of planning and more than $10 million
spent by the National Science Foundation. The team, called WISSARD, used
a custom hot-water drill with its own decontamination system. Within a
day of pulling out the tea-colored water, tests done in a temporary lab
confirmed the lake sparked with life. Researchers returned to the United
States with 8 gallons (30 liters) of lake water and eight sediment
cores from the lake bottom. Scientists at Montana State University, the
University of Tennessee and other institutions parsed out the precious
samples, growing cultures of different cell types and sequencing the DNA. The results show evidence for 3,931 species of single-celled life in Lake Whillans. [Video: Life Discovered in Subglacial Lake Whillans]...more
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