Ancient life awakens amid thawing ice caps and permafrost | Hacker News Reader

Ancient life awakens amid thawing ice caps and permafrost

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34 pointsgscott13 comments

There’s reason to be skeptical.

Here’s a lengthy twitter thread diving into the reincarnated ancient nematodes mentioned in the article: https://twitter.com/jacquelyngill/status/1148770899065266176...

That thread should be the link. We need more clear and calm explainers like that from scientists.

>as human-caused warming peels away ice cover in the Arctic and Antarctic, whoever makes it out of the ice alive is poised to dominate the budding polar ecosystems.

This should be spoken loudly and slowly, in a deep baritone.

>Hulking among the puny bacteria and amoebae were long, segmented worms complete with a head at one end and anus at the other - nematodes.

>"Of course we were surprised and very excited," Vishnivetskaya said. Clocking in at a half-millimeter long, the nematodes that wriggled back to life were the most complex creatures Vishnivetskaya - or anyone else - had ever revived after a lengthy deep freeze.

>She estimated one nematode to be 41,000 years old - by far the oldest living animal ever discovered. This very worm dwelled in the soil beneath Neanderthals' feet and had lived to meet modern-day humans in Vishnivetskaya's high-tech laboratory.

Fucking hell, they are hardy little bastards. I wonder if there's any living on comets?

> Fucking hell, they are hardy little bastards. I wonder if there's any living on comets?

Comets range from ~-220C way out it in the Kuiper belt (https://sciencing.com/temperature-comet-22136.html) to farking hot if the come in close to the sun which is a lot more extreme than the balmy -93C record low recorded in the Antarctic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowest_temperature_recorded_on...). The extreme heat would obviously effect their survival chances but I'm not sure on the cold, I wouldn't be surprised if some interesting chemical things happened when cooling to those temperatures.

> I wonder if there's any living on comets?

Wikipedia article on nematodes:

Nematode worms (C. elegans), part of an ongoing research project conducted on the Space Shuttle Columbia mission STS-107, survived the re-entry breakup. It is believed to be the first known life form to survive a virtually unprotected atmospheric descent to Earth's surface.

If we wanted to shake things up a bit, maybe we could just shoot a bunch of rocks full of nematodes in space. I’m sure some interesting things will come out of it a few billion years later!

As far as panspermia goes, I have long held that I really wouldn't be that surprised either way, recently however, I have been coming around to thinking that it seems more likely than not.

Something is wrong here. Nematodes aren't segmented animals, they dont have a differenciate head and anus in different segments. I understand that those species show a fake segmentation in the skin.

On the other hand, In all nematodes that I had seen, anus is not terminal. Nematod sheaths on the other hand can show this but they aren't alive.

Isolated cases of permafrost thawing outbreaks can scale into an epidemic black swan. For example, Canadian permafrost thawed 70 years earlier than predicted https://t.co/Lmc8x9IP6T

Since some bacteria and viruses can survive the cold, could there also be dangerous deceases buried in the permafrost?

Man, that's one ominous title

No shoggoths?

Those are in Antarctica.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(1982_film)

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