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Researchers Regenerate 400-Year-Old Frozen Plants
Several readers sent word of a group of University of Alberta researchers, who were exploring the edge of the Teardrop Glacier in northern Canada when they noticed a 'greenish tint' coming out from underneath the glacier. It turned out to be a collection of bryophytes, which likely flourished there the last time the land in that area was exposed to sunlight before the Little Ice Age. They collected samples of plants estimated to be 400 years old, and the researchers were able to get them to sprout new growths in the lab (abstract).
"The glaciers in the region have been receding at rates that have sharply accelerated since 2004, at about 3-4m per year. ... Bryophytes are different from the land plants that we know best, in that they do not have vascular tissue that helps pump fluids around different parts of the organism. They can survive being completely desiccated in long Arctic winters, returning to growth in warmer times, but Dr La Farge was surprised by an emergence of bryophytes that had been buried under ice for so long. 'When we looked at them in detail and brought them to the lab, I could see some of the stems actually had new growth of green lateral branches, and that said to me that these guys are regenerating in the field, and that blew my mind.'"
..and Monsanto will patent those plants and sue anyone who has anything to do with them in 3.. 2.. 1..
If the glacier didn't melt some, I'm sure they'd never have found those plants.
Be seeing you...
No action by the scientists led to the observed regeneration. In fact, they were shocked to discover it. The actual series of events was that plants were recovering and growing on their own, a science team noticed things looked greener than expected in recently-uncovered tundra, and upon further study confirmed that flora covered by glaciers for hundreds of years were sending out new growth.
So it's not "Researchers regenerate ..."; it should be "Researchers notice 400-year-old frozen plants buried under glacier regenerating"
Even the word regenerate isn't really correct. The real title should be "Researchers find frozen plants buried under glacier for 400 years still alive, sending out new growth."
To bad they weren't found to be over 2000 years old. Could have called that the original BC bud.
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
Or is the climate finally returning to normal? The answer depends on politics!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
The Little Ice Age was what happened the last time the Gulf Stream stopped. It was the reason why some artists had painted ordinary-looking scenes of people out on the ice of their lake -- something that had not happened before in those places. The North Atlantic gyre can be stopped by the addition of too much fresh water from melting ice, because it is the difference in salinity that drives the currents and the upwelling from the depths. We live on a planet with a lot of interconnected systems that rely on one another to keep the cycles going. A small change can have large effects.
...it'll call out, "Feeeed me, Seeeymour!"
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"I realize maybe we could argue about the rate of change, but didn't the previous ice ages ... kinda ... supposedly happen rather quickly, too?"
This isn't something you can simply write off with "I suppose we could...". There are different scales of quickly. Slow changes in the past have seen changes of a few degrees over many millions of years, some of the faster events have seen changes of a few degrees over tens to hundreds of thousands of years.
We're seeing a few degrees change over hundreds of years. That's a problem and something largely unprecedented in Earth's history without there being an obvious outside factor such as a massive meteor impact or similar. We'd know about it already if one of those were the cause, in fact no, we probably wouldn't know about it because we'd all be dead already. You can see similar events in periods of high volcanic activity and so forth also, or through noticeable solar changes but the problem is we can't find any of these that correlate with the issue either.
So therein lies the problem, the only thing we can find that correlates with the problem is us. Maybe something else is to blame and we don't know what yet, but realistically, given the rate of change, history tells us that whatever causes this much change isn't hard to find, and again, the only easy to find possibility is once more, us.
For this kind of change you need a global event, and what in the world at the moment is the only thing we can see producing measurable releases of gases altering the consistency of the atmosphere which is demonstrably a cause of increase temperature? There are no large chains of volcanos, there are no meteor impacts, the only thing we can find is is us.