Simple forms of life are quick to colonise new ’desert’ landscapes created by shrinking Arctic ice

A team of researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Leeds collected soils from an 'alien-like' post-glaciation landscape in the Norwegian archipelago, Svalbard, which had only recently been uncovered after several thousand year old ice had melted away. Upon laboratory-based analyses of these soils, they found that incredibly diverse communities of microbes, the smallest and simplest forms of life on Earth, colonised these habitats, despite freezing temperatures and relative starvation from nutrients. The microbes colonising and thriving in these soils must cope with starvation from nutrients, and extreme seasonal swings in environmental conditions, with short cool summers punctuated by long harsh winters. By comparing soils of different age, it was clear that microbial biomass and activity increased over several years of exposure. The research group from Bristol and Leeds were the first to combine molecular and geochemical analyses with new computational techniques and modelling software designed at the University of Bristol. Their findings were published recently in Biogeosciences and - This model was designed to simulate microbial growth and biogeochemical cycling in response to prevailing environmental conditions such as soil temperatures, sunlight, and the external input of nutrients. The researchers performed laboratory incubation so to constrain some key model parameters, and found remarkably low microbial growth rates.