Microbial origin of excess methane in glacial ice and implications for life on Mars

Details Microbial origin of excess methane in glacial ice and implications for life on Mars Microbial origin of excess methane in glacial ice and implications for life on Mars

Dec 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005pnas..10218292t&link_type=abstract

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, vol. 102, Issue 51, p.18292-18296

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16

Scientific paper

Methane trapped in the 3,053-m-deep Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 ice core provides an important record of millennial-scale climate change over the last 110,000 yr. However, at several depths in the lowest 90 m of the ice core, the methane concentration is up to an order of magnitude higher than at other depths. At those depths we have discovered methanogenic archaea, the in situ metabolism of which accounts for the excess methane. The total concentration of all types of microbes we measured with direct counts of Syto-23-stained cells tracks the excess of methanogens that we identified by their F420 autofluorescence and provides independent evidence for anomalous layers. The metabolic rate we estimated for microbes at those depths is consistent with the Arrhenius relation for rates found earlier for microbes imprisoned in rock, sediment, and ice. It is roughly the same as the rate of spontaneous macromolecular damage inferred from laboratory data, suggesting that microbes imprisoned in ice expend metabolic energy mainly to repair damage to DNA and amino acids rather than to grow. Equating the loss rate of methane recently discovered in the Martian atmosphere to the production rate by possible methanogens, we estimate that a possible Martian habitat would be at a temperature of 0°C and that the concentration, if uniformly distributed in a 10-m-thick layer, would be 1 cell per ml. metabolism by methanogenic archaea | methane in glacial ice | methanogens on Mars | origin of microbes in glacial ice

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