It was three, maybe four o'clock in the morning when he first saw them. Grad student Jeff Bowman was on the deck of a ship; he and a University of Washington biology team were on their way back from the North Pole. It was cold outside, the temperature had just dropped, and as the dawn broke, he could see a few, then more, then even more of these little flowery things, growing on the frozen sea.
"I was absolutely astounded," he says. They were little protrusions of ice, delicate, like snowflakes. They began growing in the dry, cold air "like a meadow spreading off in all directions. Every available surface was covered with them." What are they?
"Frost flowers," he was told. "I'd never heard of them," Jeff says, "but they were everywhere."
when he and colleagues checked, they found each frost flower housed about a million creatures. "That's 10 to the sixth! Yeah, a million bacteria."
Did that surprise you? I asked Jeff. Aren't bacteria everywhere? No, he said, not when the environment is so extremely salty, not when these bacteria are sitting on the icy surface exposed to ferociously cold air, much colder than they're used to in the sea, and not when they bathed in sunshine, which they don't see that often and shouldn't like.
No, he wasn't expecting them, and yet these bacteria seem to be very happy in their salty, sunny, freezing digs, doing — well, that's the next question: What are they doing? Professor Deming and her team are eager to figure that out. Could they be ingesting something? Exhaling something? If these frost flower meadows are going to spread, we might want to find out.