Back From the Dead: 400 Year Old Frozen Plants Revived [VIDEO]

As glaciers recede in the Canadian Arctic, a spices of plant buried beneath them is growing again. Scientists had long assumed that any plantlife entombed beneath a sheet of ice for 400 years would be dead, and any plant growth in the wake of the glacial retreat would be the result of new plant growth. But carbon dating of plants known as byrophytes shows that the plants have essentially come back from the dead, reawakening after as many as 600 years buried beneath the ice.

The finding from Catherine La Farge and her team at University of Alberta is a great coup, overturning the long-held belief that all of the plant remains exposed by retreating glaciers are dead.

In the lab, La Farge fould that the resurrected byrophytes were between 400 and 600 years old, meaning they were entombed in glaciers from the Little Ice Age that occurred between 1550 and 1850.

"We know that bryophytes can remain dormant for many years (for example, in deserts) and then are reactivated, but nobody expected them to rejuvenate after nearly 400 years beneath a glacier," La Farge said in a statement.

Bryophytes are a type of land plant without vascular tissue to transport water and nutrients. Mosses, hornworts and liverworts are the main plants considered bryophytes.

On Teardrop Glacier on Ellesmere Island, high in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, La Farge noticed that the population of byrophytes were not only intact after centuries under ice, but that they plants were in excellent condition, with some even showing signs of recent regrowth.

La Farge confirmed the field findings in the lab, where her team successfully regenerated four species of "dead" plants from parent materials.

"When we looked at them in detail and brought them to the lab, I could see some of the stems actually had new growth of green lateral branches, and that said to me that these guys are regenerating in the field, and that blew my mind," La farge told BBC News.

"If you think of ice sheets covering the landscape, we've always thought that plants have to come in from refugia around the margins of an ice system, never considering land plants as coming out from underneath a glacier."

She said byrophyte discovery will expand the current understanding of glacier ecosystems and biological reservoirs, systems becoming ever more important as glaciers melt around the globe.

"It's a whole world of what's coming out from underneath the glaciers that really needs to be studied," La Farge said to BBC.

"The glaciers are disappearing pretty fast - they're going to expose all this terrestrial vegetation, and that's going to have a big impact."