Scientists found 46,000-year-old roundworms alive beneath the Arctic ice

Scientists in Russia were thawing a sample of Siberian permafrost, when they found something completely unexpected lurking inside — a pair of living roundworms. 

The discovery became even more exciting when the team carbon dated the sample, and realized the permafrost — and the critters inside of it — were 46,000 years old, from an era known as the Pleistocene.

And one of them, it turns out, belongs to a previously unknown species. 

"I was totally flabbergasted," Teymuras Kurzchalia, a scientist who has studied the roundworms, told As It Happens guest host Aarti Pole.

Kurzchalia, a professor emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, co-authored a study about the worms which was published last week in the journal PLOS Genetics. 

Scientists say the findings could have implications for how we understand how certain species can survive in harsh conditions, and perhaps even give us hints about how to adapt to climate change. 

But it also raises the question: What else is lurking beneath the Arctic ice?

The roundworms, also known as nematodes, had been in a type of suspended animation, known as cryptobiosis, for 46 millenniums. 

That all changed when Anastasia Shatilovich, of the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science RAS in Russia, found them and thawed them out in 2018.

"I couldn't believe my eyes," Shatilovich said in an email.

Once awakened, the nematodes, both female, didn't miss a beat. They immediately began reproducing asexually in the lab.

"The greatest joy and excitement was when I saw that Pleistocene females laid eggs and live young nematodes came out of the eggs," Shatilovich said.

The original pair are now dead, but scientists have more than 1,000 of their descendants.

While other nematodes have been known to enter cryptobiosis for years — or, in some cases, decades — scientists have never before discovered ones that remained in that state for millenniums.