One theory is that\u00a0life\u00a0was more adapted\u00a0to the extreme conditions of limited oxygen and little to no light, or that life persisted at hydrothermal vents where it\u00a0could produce food from other\u00a0chemicals.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Another\u00a0theory is that life survived in meltwater ponds on the ice, like\u00a0the\u00a0cyanobacteria and algae that\u00a0currently\u00a0live on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in Antarctica.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThese surface settings could have enabled a diverse assemblage of life to persist and continue to evolve throughout the glaciations,\u201d says geochemist Fatima Husain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study but led research on this topic last year.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
Yet another possibility is that organisms survived or moved to\u202fice margins\u202fto access the oxygen in the meltwater at the base of ice.\u00a0But they would have had to\u00a0deal with the extreme\u00a0conditions\u00a0predicted by the new study.\u00a0Lending weight to this possibility is bacteria\u00a0that\u00a0have been\u00a0found<\/a>\u00a0living in similarly cold, salty brines underneath the ice on Lake Vida, Antarctica.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe keep learning more about how extreme the Cryogenian was,\u201d says Husain, \u201c and that makes life persisting and diversifying dramatically after that, all the more amazing.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One theory is that\u00a0life\u00a0was more adapted\u00a0to the extreme conditions of limited oxygen and little to no light, or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":445530,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-445529","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-environment","11":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/445530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}