Abstract
Biological activity on glaciers has been believed to be extremely limited. However, in Himalayan and Patagonian glaciers, we have found specialized biotic communities, including various cold-tolerant insects and copepods that were living on the glacier by feeding on algae and bacteria growing in the snow and ice. Since these microorganisms growing on the glacier surface are stored in the glacial strata every year, ice-core samples contain many layers with abundant microorganisms. In Himalayan glaciers, we studied snow algae on the glacier surface and in shallow ice cores, and showed that the layers with much snow algae in the ice core could be good boundary markers of annual layers and very useful for ice-core dating. Snow algae can be a new environmental proxy for studies of ice cores from warmer regions such as the Himalayas and Patagonia, where data on chemical and isotopic content data are not reliable because of heavy mixing.
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