The finding could help scientists better predict the continent's future as the climate warms. How microbes survive in lakes far below the Antarctic ice sheet is a mystery. Now scientists have figured out what's on offer for microbes in a buried lake in West Antarctica. Lake bacteria and other microbial residents dispose of carbon left behind by seawater thousands of years ago, researchers report in April AGU Advances. The finding adds to existing evidence that during a period of warming about 6,000 years ago, the ice sheet in West Antarctica was smaller than it is today. This allowed the seawater to deposit nutrients into what is now the bottom of the lake buried under hundreds of meters of ice. The study is one of the first to provide evidence from beneath the ice that the ice sheet was geologically smaller in the not-so-distant past before it grew back to its modern size, says Greg Balco, a geochemist at the Berkeley Geochronology Center. in California. (Freda Kreier, ScienceNews)