Continuing a legacy of Antarctic exploration
When Robert F. Scott’s Discovery expedition began exploring the Antarctic continent in 1901, they set out to geographically and scientifically characterize the regions touched by the Ross Sea. As the group of naval officers and scientists set foot upon the Ross Ice Shelf, they mapped their travels and completed surveys, collecting biological specimens for further study. Two polar explorers and physicians on the expedition, Reginald Koettlitz and Edward Wilson, noticed microbial mats composed of cyanobacteria growing along the edges of shallow freshwater ponds on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in and around Ross Island. In the name of natural science, they sampled them, and the preserved mats spent nearly the next century in the collections of London’s Natural History Museum. Now a new comparison of contemporary lipids with those old samples is shedding light on the evolution of complex life, and that which existed during the planet's "Snowball Earth" phase. In 2017, Anne Jungblut, a...