Nathan Finds the Methanogenic Ice Life!

I really love it when a friend of mine forwards me a news item about a science story and I can immediately tell, "Hey! I know one of the scientists who worked on that!" In this case TK forwarded me an arstechnica article on a Berkeley probe in Greenland, trying to find if archaea microbes are the cause of deep pockets of concentrated methane. (This has implications for analyzing methane concentrations--and searching for life--on Mars.) I saw the name Price--as in Buford Price, who was the Dean of physical sciences while I was a student--and realized this must be the experiment that my friend Nathan Bramall was working on. Sure enough, this New Scientist write-up helped me find the actual article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Nathan is a co-author. From NewScientist:

Live microbes making methane were found in a glacial ice core sample retrieved from three kilometres under Greenland by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, US. It is the first time such archaea have been found at that depth, says Buford Price, one of the research team . . .

Go Nathan! Related: My blogpost on seeing the 3D IMAX movie Aliens of the Deep; Methane Ice Worms on Earth, via Rhinocrisy; Abhi Tripathi won a prize for his poster about his research (looking for ancient bacteria in rocks) and recently blogged about the Tsunami epicenter's oceanic deadzone on Sepia Mutiny; and last but definitely not least--Nathan's letter to his mom from Greenland, in Issue 5 of the Berkeley Science Review. 
¶ posted by Saheli | 1:03 PM