Modern-day environments in Antarctica contain ponds filled with life forms that closely resemble early multicellular organisms.
When Earth entered a deep freeze, where did life manage to survive? According to scientists at MIT, one possible refuge was meltwater pools scattered across the planet’s icy surface.
In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers suggest that between 635 million and 720 million years ago—during the “Snowball Earth” periods when much of the planet was locked in ice—some early complex life forms may have endured in shallow meltwater ponds.
The team found that eukaryotes, the complex cells that eventually gave rise to all multicellular life, could have persisted in small bodies of water formed on the surface of shallow ice sheets near the equator. In those regions, dust and debris could have darkened the ice surface, increasing heat absorption and leading to localized melting. At temperatures close to 0 degrees Celsius, this process could have created habitable meltwater environments for early life.
To support their hypothesis, the researchers turned to present-day analogs in Antarctica. Along the edges of ice sheets, they studied small meltwater ponds similar to those that may have existed during Snowball Earth.
The team collected samples from various ponds on the McMurdo Ice Shelf, a region once described by members of Robert Falcon Scott’s 1903 expedition as “dirty ice.” In every pond they sampled, MIT scientists found evidence of eukaryotic life. The composition of these life forms varied across the ponds, revealing a surprising level of biodiversity. They also observed that salinity strongly influenced the types of organisms present: ponds with higher salt levels had more similar communities, while fresher ponds supported distinct populations.
“We’ve shown that meltwater ponds are valid candidates for where early eukaryotes could have sheltered during these planet-wide glaciation events,” says lead author Fatima Husain, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “This shows us that diversity is present and possible in these sorts of settings. It’s really a story of life’s resilience.”
The study’s MIT co-authors are Roger Summons, the Schlumberger Professor of Geobiology, and former postdoctoral researcher Thomas Evans. Additional collaborators include Jasmin Millar from Cardiff University, Anne Jungblut from the Natural History Museum in London, and Ian Hawes from the University of Waikato in New Zealand.
Polar plunge
Snowball Earth is the colloquial term for periods of time in Earth history during which the planet iced over. It is often used as a reference to the two consecutive, multi-million-year glaciation events which took place during the Cryogenian Period, which geologists refer to as the time between 635 and 720 million years ago. Whether the Earth was more of a hardened snowball or a softer “slushball” is still up for debate. But scientists are certain of one thing: Most of the planet was plunged into a deep freeze, with average global temperatures of minus 50 degrees Celsius. The question has been: How and where did life survive?
“We’re interested in understanding the foundations of complex life on Earth. We see evidence for eukaryotes before and after the Cryogenian in the fossil record, but we largely lack direct evidence of where they may have lived during,” Husain says. “The great part of this mystery is, we know life survived. We’re just trying to understand how and where.”
There are a number of ideas for where organisms could have sheltered during Snowball Earth, including in certain patches of the open ocean (if such environments existed), in and around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and under ice sheets. In considering meltwater ponds, Husain and her colleagues pursued the hypothesis that surface ice meltwaters may also have been capable of supporting early eukaryotic life at the time.
“There are many hypotheses for where life could have survived and sheltered during the Cryogenian, but we don’t have excellent analogs for all of them,” Husain notes. “Above-ice meltwater ponds occur on Earth today and are accessible, giving us the opportunity to really focus in on the eukaryotes which live in these environments.”
Small pond, big life
For their new study, the researchers analyzed samples taken from meltwater ponds in Antarctica. In 2018, Summons and colleagues from New Zealand traveled to a region of the McMurdo Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, known to host small ponds of melted ice, each just a few feet deep and a few meters wide. There, water freezes all the way to the seafloor, in the process trapping dark-colored sediments and marine organisms. Wind-driven loss of ice from the surface creates a sort of conveyer belt that brings this trapped debris to the surface over time, where it absorbs the sun’s warmth, causing ice to melt, while surrounding debris-free ice reflects incoming sunlight, resulting in the formation of shallow meltwater ponds.
The bottom of each pond is lined with mats of microbes that have built up over years to form layers of sticky cellular communities.
“These mats can be a few centimeters thick, colorful, and they can be very clearly layered,” Husain says.
These microbial mats are made up of cyanobacteria, prokaryotic, single-celled photosynthetic organisms that lack a cell nucleus or other organelles. While these ancient microbes are known to survive within some of the harshest environments on Earth including meltwater ponds, the researchers wanted to know whether eukaryotes — complex organisms that evolved a cell nucleus and other membrane-bound organelles — could also weather similarly challenging circumstances. Answering this question would take more than a microscope, as the defining characteristics of the microscopic eukaryotes present among the microbial mats are too subtle to distinguish by eye.
To characterize the eukaryotes, the team analyzed the mats for specific lipids they make called sterols, as well as genetic components called ribosomal ribonucleic acid (rRNA), both of which can be used to identify organisms with varying degrees of specificity. These two independent sets of analyses provided complementary fingerprints for certain eukaryotic groups. As part of the team’s lipid research, they found many sterols and rRNA genes closely associated with specific types of algae, protists, and microscopic animals among the microbial mats. The researchers were able to assess the types and relative abundance of lipids and rRNA genes from pond to pond, and found the ponds hosted a surprising diversity of eukaryotic life.
“No two ponds were alike,” Husain says. “There are repeating casts of characters, but they’re present in different abundances. And we found diverse assemblages of eukaryotes from all the major groups in all the ponds studied. These eukaryotes are the descendants of the eukaryotes that survived the Snowball Earth. This really highlights that meltwater ponds during Snowball Earth could have served as above-ice oases that nurtured the eukaryotic life that enabled the diversification and proliferation of complex life — including us — later on.”
Reference: “Biosignatures of diverse eukaryotic life from a Snowball Earth analogue environment in Antarctica” by Fatima Husain, Jasmin L. Millar, Anne D. Jungblut, Ian Hawes, Thomas W. Evans and Roger E. Summons, 19 June 2025, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-60713-5
This research was supported in part by the NASA Exobiology Program, the Simons Collaboration on the Origins of Life, and a MISTI grant from MIT-New Zealand.
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