Bugs in the Ice Sheet; May 2012; Scientific American Magazine; by Cheryl Katz; 1 Page(s)

Locked in frozen vaults in Antarctica and Greenland, a lost world of ancient creatures awaits another chance at life. Once thought to be too harsh and inhospitable to support any living thing, the polar ice sheets are now known to be a gigantic reservoir of microbial life, trapped longer than modern humans have walked the planet.

With that ice melting at an alarming rate, the earth could soon see masses of bacteria and other microbes the likes of which it has not seen since the Middle Pleistocene, a previous period of major climate change, some 750,000 years ago.