Скачать или смотреть Surviving Earth's Extremes: How Antarctic Animals Freeze and Reanimate

In the coldest, windiest location on Earth, BYU professor Byron Adams and his students (referred to as "worm herders" by helicopter pilots) are studying the genes that allow microscopic animals to survive even after they have frozen solid or dried out. In Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys, where no other animals survive, Adams says they chisel down into the ice-cemented permafrost that may have been frozen for thousands of years "and then we bring these chunks of ice back to the lab, thaw it out, and the animals just like are crawling around in there, completely alive. It makes me wonder how they were able to survive for so long and then be reanimated again."

These studies of obscure microscopic worms and their regenerative abilities may have application for humans, says Adams. "The process of anhydrobiosis may have applications that are important to humans. For example, in agriculture, if they could express molecules that help them to survive anhydrobiosis plants would become freeze tolerant. If we want to fly a space ship in another solar system, perhaps we could learn from the nematodes how we could put humans into suspended animation."

Just how long could a nematode remain frozen, or dried out, and still regenerate? "At this point, we really don't know how long these things can survive... It could be that they survived the Pleistocene in a block of ice or dried up to a crisp like a little Cheerio."

Adams multi-year research about Antarctica and survival genes is funded by the National Science Foundation. At BYU, Adams has mentored 104 undergraduate and graduate students who have been able to work on the Antarctica project and study the genes that allow animals to survive in extreme environments.

In a 2016 issue of Nature Scientific Reports, Adams published a study about how nematodes and tardigrades might have survived the Ice Age. The study revealed that these unique species could not have migrated to Antarctica from other continents, keeping the mystery of their survival and the limits of their abilities to freeze and reanimate. See more about this research here.