PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Ancient algae found deep in tropical glacier

Rice University, Ohio State, Nebraska scientists prove core competency in finding millennium-old diatoms

Ancient algae found deep in tropical glacier
2015-06-01
(Press-News.org) HOUSTON - (June 1, 2015) - The remains of tiny creatures found deep inside a mountaintop glacier in Peru are clues to the local landscape more than a millennium ago, according to a new study by Rice University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Ohio State University.

The unexpected discovery of diatoms, a type of algae, in ice cores pulled from the Quelccaya Summit Dome Glacier demonstrate that freshwater lakes or wetlands that currently exist at high elevations on or near the mountain were also there in earlier times. The abundant organisms would likely have been transported in air currents to the glacier, where they were deposited on its surface, dead or alive, and ultimately became frozen within the glacial ice and persisted there for hundreds of years.

The study is the first to show the presence of diatoms in glacial ice from tropical regions. The diatoms offer useful information about conditions in and around the Andes when they were deposited on the ice.

The paper is the result of a unique collaboration among Rice chemists Ed Billups and Bruce Brinson, Ohio State climatologist Lonnie Thompson and lead author Sherilyn Fritz, a geoscientist at Nebraska. It appears this week in Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, a journal published by the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Of the four scientists, Billups, Brinson and even Thompson had something in common with the focus of their study: They were all, figuratively, fish out of water.

"I was the lucky latecomer to the group," said Fritz, who studies diatoms from cores she and her students drill from South American lakebeds. "It's only because Bruce was so observant and curious and did such a nice job on documenting the diatoms that it happened at all."

Over a long and storied career, Thompson has collected ice cores from many of the world's hard-to-reach locations, including Quelccaya in 2003. The cores contain a climate record that spans millennia, but Thompson's ability to pull hard data from his samples was complicated by the sheer number he had preserved.

Thompson said the first record of diatoms in tropical glaciers "points to the potential of these archives for investigating how not just diatoms but other life forms such as ancient microbes survived, thrived and evolved under extreme conditions and under very different climatic regimes."

The collaboration began when Thompson visited Rice for a conference and struck up a conversation with Billups, with whom he shares West Virginia roots.

"We got to talking," said Billups of their first encounter. "He knew we were working on carbon materials and said, 'You know, sometimes my ice is black, and I think that's carbon.'" Billups, whose wide-ranging research includes the study of all forms of carbon, suspected wind currents carried fullerenes from forest fires to the mountaintop and offered to have a look.

Thompson sent ice core filtrates in silica filter paper that preserved the contents of water from three layers corresponding to the years 1161 to 1176, 807 to 837 and 460 to 511 A.D. (The earliest samples tested for the study were from about 540 feet below the surface of the 18,000-foot mountain.) "When I looked at the samples, I thought, 'Whatever are we going to do with these?'" Billups recalled.

"We realized they weren't appropriate for searching for fullerenes," said Brinson, a Rice research scientist.

Brinson looked at the samples through a Rice electron microscope and quickly recognized their significance. Rather than fullerenes, they contained what the paper described as "a serendipitous byproduct": an abundance of diatoms, the study of which is generally well outside the realm of either chemists or glaciologists.

"When we saw the first diatom and realized it possessed periodic nanoscale structure, we knew we were documenting irreplaceable snapshots in archeological time and space," Brinson said.

"Thompson was very excited about this," Billups said. "Diatoms are found in Arctic and Antarctic ice, but he said nobody's ever found them in equatorial glaciers."

Brinson hit the books and identified many of the diatoms, which ranged in size from a few to 70 microns in length. "I don't have a biological background, but I knew they were unique," he said. He also realized the team needed a specialist.

Thompson, who knew of Fritz's work in South America, suggested they enlist her.

"There are diatoms in dust that is transported globally, and people have found them in glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland, so my first thought was they'd be like those," Fritz said. "But these are beautifully preserved, and most of the ecology we know about indicates they're not from global diatom dust sources."

Fritz said the diatoms' excellent condition suggested they hadn't traveled far. "Most but not all of them are species you would find in very dilute freshwater, either lakes or wetlands, and there are lots of those in the tropical Andes at varied elevations," she said. The presence of Volvox, green algae found in the two older samples, confirmed the diatoms' freshwater source.

The study has Fritz thinking about gathering diatoms from lakes near the ice cap to see how diatom populations have changed over the centuries. "I've contemplated doing some more sampling, just because it's an interesting question," she said. She does plan to have her students take a closer look at the original samples, which Brinson sent her, "to do some quantitative counts, just to get a better sense of the relative abundance of things."

The researchers wrote that continuing study of diatoms in relation to other materials found in the ice core record could provide valuable information about local or even global environmental change.

"I'm convinced there's no end to what you can find in these glaciers," Billups said.

"One thing is clear," Thompson said. "The greatest scientific progress going forward will be made with increased collaboration among many different disciplines. Unfortunately, these valuable ice archives of our past are rapidly disappearing under the present climate conditions."

INFORMATION:

The Welch Foundation, the Byrd Polar Research Center, the Shared Equipment Authority at Rice and the National Science Foundation supported the research.

Read the abstract at http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1657/AAAR0014-075

This news release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu/2015/06/01/algae-found-deep-in-tropical-glacier/

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews

Related Materials:

Ed Billups Research Group: http://billups.rice.edu

Sherilyn Fritz: http://eas2.unl.edu/~sfritz/

Ice Core Paleoclimatology Research Group (Thompson): http://bprc.osu.edu/Icecore/

Byrd Polar Research Center: http://bprc.osu.edu

Rice University's Wiess School of Natural Sciences: http://naturalsciences.rice.edu

Images for download:

http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/0506_DIATOMS-1-web.jpg

Rice University's Ed Billups, left, a professor of chemistry, and Bruce Brinson, a research scientist, discovered diatoms, a type of algae, in ice cores pulled from a mountaintop glacier in Peru. The samples date back to the sixth century and are the first freshwater diatoms found in tropical glaciers. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/0506_DIATOMS-2-web.jpg

Pennate (elongated) diatoms found in an ice core from the Quelccaya Summit Dome Glacier were among many samples identified by scientists at Rice University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Ohio State University. They suspect the freshwater diatoms, a type of algae, were blown there from nearby high-elevation ponds as far back as the sixth century. (Credit: Bruce Brinson/Rice University)

http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/0506_DIATOMS-10-web.jpg The remains of an aulacoseira alpigena diatom found in ice from the Quelccaya Summit Dome Glacier. (Credit: Bruce Brinson/Rice University)

http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/0506_DIATOMS-11-web.jpg

The remains of a pinnularia borealis diatom found in ice from the Quelccaya Summit Dome Glacier. (Credit: Bruce Brinson/Rice University)

http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/0506_DIATOMS-3-WEB.jpg

Explorers led by Ohio State University climatologist Lonnie Thompson make their way across the Quelccaya Summit Dome Glacier in Peru during the 2003 expedition that produced the ice cores from which freshwater diatoms were extracted. The diatoms were discovered in the ice record by scientists at Rice University, in collaboration with Thompson and Sherilyn Fritz at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. (Credit: Ohio State University)

http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/0506_DIATOMS-4-web.jpg

Ohio State University climatologist Lonnie Thompson, left, and his colleagues handle an ice core pulled from the Quelccaya Summit Dome Glacier in Peru during their 2003 expedition. (Credit: Ohio State University)

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,920 undergraduates and 2,567 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just over 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is highly ranked for best quality of life by the Princeton Review and for best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go here.

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Mike Williams
713-348-6728
mikewilliams@rice.edu


[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Ancient algae found deep in tropical glacier Ancient algae found deep in tropical glacier 2 Ancient algae found deep in tropical glacier 3

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

A new perspective on Phantom Eye Syndrome

2015-06-01
Researchers from the University of Liverpool have found that approximately half of patients who have an eye removed because of a form of eye cancer experience `phantom eye syndrome.' Patients with the condition experience "seeing" and pain in the eye that is no longer there. Researchers assessed 179 patients whose eye had been removed as a result of a cancer, called intraocular melanoma. They found that more than a third of the patients experienced phantom eye symptoms every day. In most patients, the symptoms ceased spontaneously, but some patients reported that they ...

Highly explosive volcanism at Galapagos

2015-06-01
Understanding the volcanic activity on Earth is not only important in order to limit the impact of natural disasters, volcanic eruptions also have a large impact on the climate and evolution of life on our planet. However, many details in the history of volcanic activity are still unknown. Scientists from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, together with colleagues from the USA, Taiwan, Australia and Switzerland, now have been able to track the development of the Galapagos volcanoes in the time frame between eight and 16 million years ago. In the process ...

Insulin degludec: No hint of added benefit in children and adolescents

2015-06-01
Insulin degludec (trade name: Tresiba) has been approved since January 2015 for adolescents and children from the age of one year with type 1 or type 2 diabetes mellitus. In an early benefit assessment pursuant to the Act on the Reform of the Market for Medicinal Products (AMNOG), the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) has now examined whether this new drug, alone or in combination with other blood-glucose lowering drugs, offers an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapy. No added benefit of insulin degludec for adolescents ...

Scientists discover protein that plays key role in streptococcal infections

2015-06-01
The effort to identify new ways of fighting infections has taken a step forward now that scientists have identified a key protein involved in the host's response to strep infections. This protein, called "NFAT," appears to play a key role in the body's inflammatory response to an infection, which when uncontrolled, can be as bad, if not worse, than the infection itself. Furthermore, this discovery was made using streptococcal bacteria, which are responsible for a wide range of human illnesses, ranging from sore throat and pink eye to meningitis and bacterial pneumonia. ...

Thin coating on condensers could make power plants more efficient

2015-06-01
CAMBRIDGE, Mass--Most of the world's electricity-producing power plants -- whether powered by coal, natural gas, or nuclear fission -- make electricity by generating steam that turns a turbine. That steam then is condensed back to water, and the cycle begins again. But the condensers that collect the steam are quite inefficient, and improving them could make a big difference in overall power plant efficiency. Now, a team of researchers at MIT has developed a way of coating these condenser surfaces with a layer of graphene, just one atom thick, and found that this can ...

SIRFLOX study presented at ASCO 2015 Annual Meeting

2015-06-01
Chicago, IL, USA (30 May 2015) -- The benefits of adding liver-directed SIR-Spheres Y-90 resin microspheres to a current systemic chemotherapy for the first-line treatment of unresectable metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) reported in the SIRFLOX study, were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago. The results of the 530-patient SIRFLOX randomized controlled study, which open new possibilities for combining radiation targeted at liver metastases with first-line systemic treatment of mCRC, were presented by Associate Professor ...

PharmaMar's PM1183 plus doxorubicin shows remarkable activity in small cell lung cancer

2015-06-01
Chicago and Madrid, June 1st 2015: PharmaMar today announced data from a Phase 1b study of the transcriptional inhibitor PM1183 in combination with doxorubicin in second line therapy in patients with small cell lung cancer (SCLC) showing that the treatment induced objective responses in 67% of the patients, including 10% of them where all signs of cancer disappeared (complete responses). Every patient with SCLC denominated primary chemotherapy-sensitive (their chemotherapy-free interval (CTFI) is more than 90 days) responded to treatment, including 18% of complete responses. ...

Trabectedin shows activity in ATREUS trial in patients with sarcomatoid malignant mesothelioma

2015-06-01
Chicago and Madrid, June 1st 2015: PharmaMar today announced data from a Phase 2 study in patients with sarcomatoid/biphasic malignant pleural mesothelioma showing that 41.2% (95% CI: 18.4-67.1) of patients treated with the anticancer drug trabectedin in second line were alive and free of progression at 12 weeks. The median progression-free survival (PFS) in these 17 evaluated patients was 8.3 weeks. There were 5 patients who continue receiving trabectedin beyond 12 weeks. "Mesothelioma patients usually do not respond to second-line treatments so the preliminary data ...

Vitamin D and calcium supplements do not improve menopausal symptoms

2015-06-01
PORTLAND, Ore., June 01, 2015 -- Women who took vitamin D and calcium supplements had the same number of menopausal symptoms as women who did not take the supplements, according to a study published today in Maturitas, the official journal of the European Menopause and Andropause Society. The study, which involved 34,157 women ages 50-79, is part of the Women's Health Initiative, one of the largest clinical trials ever undertaken to address the most common causes of death, disability and impaired quality of life in menopausal women. "Our study suggests that women ...

Psychology: Does aging affect decision making?

2015-06-01
Aging is associated with significant decline in cognitive functions. But does this translate into poorer decision making? Psychologists from the University of Basel and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development report that in simple decision situations, older adults perform just as well as younger adults. However, according to their study published in the academic journal Cognition, aging may affect decision performance in more complex decision situations. Important decisions in politics and economics are often made by older people: According to Forbes magazine, ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Mandatory standards for the indoor environment would result in immense benefits to the health and productivity of people around the world

Chickadees have unique neural “barcodes” for memories of stashing away food

Chickadees are memory geniuses. Their barcode-like neural activity may be to thank

Tiny orchid flowers pollinated by tiny flies

Researchers develop AI-based tool paving the way for personalized cancer treatments

Reports of COVID-19 vaccine adverse events in predominantly republican vs democratic states

Patient out-of-pocket costs for biologic drugs after biosimilar competition

New Brigham research highlights combining prostate MRI with a blood test to avoid unnecessary prostate biopsies

Scientists discover a key quality-control mechanism in DNA replication

Lipids with potential health benefits in herbal teas

Synergically improved energy storage performance and stability in sol–gel processed BaTiO3/(Pb,La,Ca)TiO3/BaTiO3 tri-layer films with a crystalline engineered sandwich structure

International collaboration enabled participatory stock assessment on glass eel fisheries in West Java, Indonesia

Enhanced melanoma vaccine offers improved survival for men

Nearly one-third of patients with TBI have marginal or inadequate health literacy

Genetic causes of cerebral palsy uncovered through whole-genome sequencing

Modesty and boastfulness – perception depends on usual performance

Do sweeteners increase your appetite? New evidence from randomised controlled trial says no 

Women with obesity do not need to gain weight during pregnancy, new study suggests

Individuals with multiple sclerosis face substantially greater risk of hospitalisation and death from COVID-19, despite high rates of vaccination

Study shows obesity in childhood associated with a more than doubling of risk of developing multiple sclerosis in early adulthood

Rice Emerging Scholars Program receives $2.5M NSF grant to boost STEM education

Virtual rehabilitation provides benefits for stroke recovery

Generative AI develops potential new drugs for antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Biofuels could help island nations survive a global catastrophe, study suggests

NJIT research team discovering how fluids behave in nanopores with NSF grant

New study shows association of historical housing discrimination and shortfalls in colon cancer treatment

Social media use may help to empower plastic surgery patients

Q&A: How to train AI when you don't have enough data

Wayne State University researchers uncover potential treatment targets for Zika virus-related eye abnormalities

Discovering Van Gogh in the wild: scientists unveil a new gecko species

[Press-News.org] Ancient algae found deep in tropical glacier
Rice University, Ohio State, Nebraska scientists prove core competency in finding millennium-old diatoms