{"id":86691,"date":"2019-01-15T12:05:17","date_gmt":"2019-01-15T20:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/hidden-beneath-a-half-mile-of-ice-antarctic-lake-teems-with-life"},"modified":"2019-01-15T12:05:17","modified_gmt":"2019-01-15T20:05:17","slug":"hidden-beneath-a-half-mile-of-ice-antarctic-lake-teems-with-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/hidden-beneath-a-half-mile-of-ice-antarctic-lake-teems-with-life","title":{"rendered":"Hidden Beneath a Half Mile of Ice, Antarctic Lake Teems with Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/hidden-beneath-a-half-mile-of-ice-antarctic-lake-teems-with-life.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The dark waters of a lake deep beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet and a few hundred miles from the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/11362-north-south-poles-10-wild-differences.html\">South Pole<\/a> are teeming with bacterial life, say scientists \u2014 despite it being one of the most extreme environments on Earth.<\/p>\n<p>The discovery has implications for the search for life on other planets \u2014 in particular on the planet Mars, where signs of a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/41272-mars-liquid-water-below-ice-cap.html\">buried lake of liquid saltwater<\/a> were seen in data reported last year by the European Space Agency\u2019s orbiting <a href=\"http:\/\/sci.esa.int\/mars-express\/\">Mars Express spacecraft<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Expedition leader John Priscu, a professor of polar ecology at the University of Montana, told Live Science in a telephone interview from Antarctica this week that early studies of water samples taken from Lake Mercer \u2014 which is buried beneath a glacier \u2014 showed that they contained approximately 10,000 bacterial cells per milliliter.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/64501-buried-lake-antarctica-life.html\">https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/64501-buried-lake-antarctica-life.html<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The dark waters of a lake deep beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet and a few hundred miles from the South Pole are teeming with bacterial life, say scientists \u2014 despite it being one of the most extreme environments on Earth. The discovery has implications for the search for life on other planets \u2014 in [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86691\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}