A fresh offering for #FieldPhotoFriday / #FridayFieldworkPhoto

Sampling frozen #microbial communities from the surface of a High Arctic #glacier yesterday - what lives through polar night? #NERC #Aberystwyth #Svalbard

As a way of extending an #introduction to the #science I have most fun doing, I'll do a few toots on different areas of our #research.

Our continued warming of the atmosphere means #glaciers across the world are melting. Many will fade away this century. Our work examines how life is flushed out from melting glaciers, and what this means as icy habitats hosting vast repositories of #microbes and #genomes are deleted by #climate warming. This is our newest paper on this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00609-0

As a way of extending an #introduction to the #science I have most fun doing, I'll do a few toots on different areas of our #research.

In 2016, we realised we could perhaps take #DNA #sequencing to the field, to generate #microbiomes & #metagenomes in real time. Some of our lessons from #nanopore field #genomics are here: https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.001220

It's meant we've sequenced on glaciers, in glaciers, coal mines, drill sites, and for #scicomm. Here's a #MinION being run for RI Christmas Lectures

As a way of extending an #introduction to the #science I have most fun doing, I'll do a few tweets on different areas of our #research.

We are excited to be in a team led by UNIS Svalbard: The BIOICE project explores #cryoconite on glaciers in #Antarctica.

There, it's so cold, these pothole-like #ecosystems are sealed by ice lids for years/decades. But, there are millions of #microbes trapped inside these icy greenhouses, and they form the southerly limit of photosynthesis on Earth.

As a way of extending an #introduction to the #science I have most fun doing, I'll do a few tweets on different areas of our #research.

Next up: #glaciers are very cold, poor in nutrients, and found in high altitudes/latitudes, but they host abundant & diverse #microbiomes in summer: lots of daylight & liquid water helps.

But we don't know enough about glacier life in the #Arctic winter. Soon we'll be heading back to the glaciers to explore how their #microbes survive the #polarnight #NERC

As a way of extending an #introduction to the science I have most fun doing, I'll do a few tweets on different areas of our #research.

Firstly - #cryoconite on #glaciers is dark granules of dust bundled by #cyanobacteria, forming pot-hole like ecosystems. I'm a career-long cryoconite nerd.

One of our papers shows how the cryoconite microbiome is stabilised at optimal levels of primary production by 3D reshaping of the physical #ecosystem on #Greenland's ice.

Paper: https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1462-2920.13349