Host: Jeff Fox with special guest, Jon Telling.

Jon Telling of Bristol University in Bristol, United Kingdom talks with Jeff Fox about his findings suggesting that the grinding of glaciers over rocks can liberate hydrogen, which, in turn, drives the growth of methanogens within microbial ecosystems.

Telling and his collaborators provide evidence that the grinding of rocks beneath glaciers can free hydrogen gas from minerals in those rocks. In turn, that hydrogen provides energy to furnish the metabolic needs of particular microorganisms, called methanogens, that produce methane and other organic molecules from carbon dioxide through a non-photosynthetic process.

“This is an important new mechanism for hydrogen production,” says Christopher McKay, senior planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., who was not involved in conducting this research. “Water-water reactions producing hydrogen are usually associated with high temperature systems, and it has been thought that they could not operate at low temperatures. This shows how hydrogen can be produced in an ice-covered system and has huge implications for ice-sealed Antarctic ecosystems such as Lake Vida and for the ice-covered ocean moons of the outer Solar System, Europa and Enceladus.” The research also has important implications for subglacial environments that acted as refuges during the early history of our planet, enabling microorganisms to survive during the Neoproterozoic glaciations, also called Snowball Earth.

This story was featured in the April 2016 issue of Microbe Magazine.

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