I’ve been fascinated by glaciers since I was 14, when geography textbooks taught me about strange rivers of ice that crept down yawning valleys like giant serpents stalking their next meal. That kernel of wonder has carried me through a career of more than 25 years. I’ve travelled to the world’s peaks and its poles to see over 20 glaciers. Yet, when I first started out as a researcher in the early 1990s, we were convinced glaciers were lifeless deserts.
Then in 1999, Professor Martin Sharp and colleagues discovered bacteria living beneath the Haut Glacier d’Arolla in Switzerland. It seemed that glaciers, like the soil or our stomachs, had their own community of microbes, their own microbiome. Since then, we’ve found microorganisms just about everywhere within glaciers, transforming what we thought were sterile wastelands into vibrant ecosystems.