IN THE icy expanse of the Arctic Ocean, a strange beast glides through the endless tunnels that honeycomb the floating sea ice. Propelled by a whip-like tail, it thrives at temperatures that would kill a human in minutes.
As winter approaches, the mercury drops and the sea ice hardens. Those tunnels of water close up and almost disappear. Temperatures plummet below -20 °C. But the whip-tailed beast, a bacterium called Colwellia 34H, remains alive and well, sealed in the ice in bubbles of briny liquid not much larger than its own single-celled body.
Colwellia used to be seen as a freak of nature, the hardiest of all cold-loving bugs. But biologists are starting to realise that it is not at all unusual. Wherever they look - in permafrost, icebergs, glaciers or ice caps - they find die-hard life forms whose appetite for enduring the cold simply astonishes.
Take the recent ...
18:00 07 October 2008
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