After a four-hundred year slumber, plants recovered from the remains of a receding glacier have awakened in a lab. These byrophytes, a class of non-vascular vegetation which encompasses hornworts, mosses, and liverworts, among other species, display an astounding resistance to the elements. Nature, it seems, always finds a way.
Dr. Catherine La Farge of the University of Alberta and a team of researchers plucked the plant from Canada's Teardrop Glacier and dated the remains to the mid-sixteenth century, the dawn of the 'Little Ice Age.' This cooling period ended roughly during mid-eighteen hundreds.
LaFarge explains, "These simple, efficient plants, which have been around for more than 400 million years, have evolved a unique biology for optimal resilience. Any bryophyte cell can reprogram itself to initiate the development of an entire new plant. This is equivalent to stem cells in faunal systems."
"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," she adds. "Bryophytes are extremophiles that can thrive where other plants don't, hence they play a vital role in the establishment, colonisation and maintenance of polar ecosystems."
The team is optimistic that as the glacier continues to shift, new samples will be uncovered.
The professor told BBC News, "It's a whole world of what's coming out from underneath the glaciers that really need to be studied."
The study will be published in the journal Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences.
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