Ariel Waldman

And so I would say all of the microorganisms in Antarctica, 100% are extremophiles because they're not only able to survive the cold and the dry, but they're also able to survive the Antarctic winter, which is six months of darkness.

Yikes.

really frigid temperatures, and then come back to life.

And most of them do go into suspended animation and then pop back, and that's how they're able to survive.

And that's the reason we haven't seen invasive species in that area of Antarctica, because even if they came in, the likelihood that they could survive the Antarctic winter is really, really small for now.

I would say unlikely.

There are people studying viruses in Antarctica, but a lot of the things that can be defrosted were tailored to an ecosystem that no longer exists.

And so if you get like an old virus popping back because a glacier is melting or the permafrost is melting...

It's not a zombie apocalypse movie.

It's like that thing's probably going to be really short lived because it was tailored to live in a very different environment than exists today.

So I'm not too worried about that.

But it is fascinating that people are studying, you know, those sorts of microorganisms.

Antarctica, at one point during the Jurassic period, was actually a tropical beach near the equator.

That's why you get all sorts of, like, great fossils in Antarctica of, you know, dinosaurs and other things.

Because it was a Jurassic beach, and you can see...

the sandstone from that Jurassic beach still in Antarctica that's now exposed.

It moved south and became what we know today, but it was not always at the bottom of the earth.

And that relates to a lot of the life you find there.

So a lot of the microscopic life in the dry valleys has been isolated for around 20 million years.

But