Scientists have found that plants which were frozen during the Little Ice Age - a cold period between the mid-16th to mid-19th Century - are sprouting new growth.
Samples of 400-year-old plants known as bryophytes have flourished under laboratory conditions which may have implications for how ecosystems recover from the planet's cyclic long periods of ice coverage, researchers said.
Scientists from the University of Alberta were exploring an area around the Teardrop Glacier, high in the Canadian Arctic. The glaciers in the region have been receding at rates that have sharply accelerated since 2004, at about 3-4m per year.
This has exposed land that has not seen light of day since the Little Ice Age, a widespread climatic cooling that ran roughly from AD 1550 to AD 1850, BBC News reported.
"We ended up walking along the edge of the glacier margin and we saw these huge populations coming out from underneath the glacier that seemed to have a greenish tint," said Catherine La Farge, lead author of the study.
Bryophytes are different from the land plants as they do not have vascular tissue that helps pump fluids around different parts of the organism.
They can survive being completely desiccated in long Arctic winters, returning to growth in warmer times, but La Farge was surprised by an emergence of bryophytes that had been buried under ice for so long.
"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," she told the BBC.
"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.
