Organisms always get trapped in an ice cap as it is forming. The unwitting bacterium can be locked away for aeons never to be heard from again. Or not. A group of scientists with an ice sample over 8 million years old were able to find one type of bacterium in it that they were able to thaw out and grow in a culture. The bacteria exhibited extremely sluggish reproductive behavior, doubling once every seventy days. (In contrast, the cancer cells I worked with this summer double every day.) They attribute the slow growth to the cosmic radiation that was able to scramble the microbe's DNA for so long a period. (link via New Scientist).Now imagine the thinning ice caps, and the fact that more microbes like this one will be spilling into the sea. Seems like the earth created another unwitting compensatory mechanism to deal with warming periods. And if not, atleast it's pretty cool to see the old become new again.
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