By the end of the last Ice Age, Lake Hodgson on the Antarctic Peninsula was covered by more than 1,300 feet of ice. But as time passed, the ice receded. Lake Hodgson is now considered to be an emerging subglacial lake, covered by about 12 feet of ice, which is thin enough for researchers to drill through and collect samples from the lake bottom.
The mud at the bottom of the lake is like a time capsule, having microbes that have lived there for millennia. The top layers of sediment contained microbes currently or recently living in the lake. But as the researchers drilled deeper they obtained sediment samples with DNA from microbes that most likely date back almost 100,000 years.
Read the full, original story here: Ancient Fossilized DNA Found in Subglacial Lake Sediment
