Plants revived after 400-year deep freeze may help colonize Mars

Frozen under thick glacial ice in northern Canada for at least 400 years, a primitive type of plant has come back to life in the lab, and this may actually help efforts to establish a human colony on Mars.

It may sound like the start of one of those 'nature-gets-back-at-humans' sci-fi movies, but after a team of researchers from the University of Alberta gathered samples of a type of plant called bryophytes, which were frozen under the Teardrop Glacier on Ellesmere Island sometime during the Little Ice Age — between 400 and 600 years ago — those plants actually started to grow when they were brought back to the lab.

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Before this discovery, it was assumed that plants exposed by retreating glaciers were dead, and that it was newer species that moved in to take over the freshly exposed land. However, putting the plant samples through radiocarbon dating showed that they were definitely as old as the researchers thought, and when they ground up the samples, planted them (some just in normal potting soil) and watered them for a year, they found that 30 per cent of the samples regrew.

"We know that bryophytes can remain dormant for many years (for example, in deserts) and then are reactivated, but nobody expected them to rejuvenate after nearly 400 years beneath a glacier," said Catherine La Farge, director and curator of the UofA's Cryptogamic Herbarium, in a University of Alberta press statement.

Bryophytes, such as mosses, are extremely simple plants that lack a true 'vascular system' — the plant equivalent of the blood stream, that allowed them to grow taller. Bryophytes are able to transport water and nutrients through their stems and leaves, but they developed at a time before modern plants evolved the more efficient way of keeping themselves fed and hydrated. However, their primitive nature is the reason for how hearty these plants are, and why they were able to survive this sort of natural cryogenic preservation.

"These simple, efficient plants, which have been around for more than 400 million years, have evolved a unique biology for optimal resilience," La Farge said in the statement. "Any bryophyte cell can reprogram itself to initiate the development of an entire new plant. This is equivalent to stem cells in [plants]."

"Bryophytes are extremophiles that can thrive where other plants don’t, hence they play a vital role in the establishment, colonization and maintenance of polar ecosystems," La Farge said. "This discovery emphasizes the importance of research that helps us understand the natural world, given how little we still know about polar ecosystems — with applied spinoffs for understanding reclamation that we may never have anticipated."

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One of those 'applied spinoffs' may be to send these plants to Mars, to see if they can survive in that kind of environment.

"We're not really dealing with a moonscape on the Arctic, but we're definitely under pretty extreme conditions," La Farge said in an interview with The Canadian Press. "We now talk about people ... wanting to go to Mars and starting a whole new world out there. If you were going to send any kind of plant up there to see whether it could survive, bryophytes would probably be one of your key systems to try."

We certainly wouldn't be walking around on Mars without spacesuits anytime soon, of course, but it would be very interesting to set up a primitive terraforming project with these plants. Shield them from radiation and any of the toxic Martian dust, but give them access to the atmosphere so they can exchange carbon dioxide and oxygen. It might simply be a good way for the colonists to develop a perpetual oxygen supply, but it would also be very cool to see what would happen to the Martian environment after a long period of time.

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