400-Year-Old Plants Shows Signs of Growth in Laboratory Settings
A plant that is suspected to be over 400 years old and that was uncovered due to the receding artic glaciers showed signs of growth.
The research was led by Catherine La Farge, a biologist at the University of Alberta, and was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
La Farge and her team collected more than two dozen moss samples that were recovered from underneath ice from the Teardrop glacier in northern Canada's Ellesmere Island. The plant material was revealed to be bryophytes, a type of plant known to be very durable.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
"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," La Farge said in a statement.
Radiocarbon dating showed that the plants ranged from 400 to 600 years old. La Farge and her colleagues believe that the plants were able to survive due to being in a permanent frozen state during a time period that has been described as the Little Ice Age, which affected much of Europe and North America from about 1550 to 1850.
La Farge was able to discoverer through experimentation that the plant material was able to grow in laboratory settings. La Farge put the plant material in petri dishes after about four to six weeks the plant began to show signs of growth.
"Either it kept its color under the glacier or it grew after the moss emerged 400 years later," she told The Edmonton Journal.
"Now we have to think there may be populations of land plants that survived that freezing," she said. "It makes you wonder what's under the big ice caps in the Arctic and Antarctic and alpine glaciers. And we have a 400-year-old lineage of genetic material."
