U of A researcher Catherine La Farge, '88 MSc, '97 PhD, garnered rock star status in the botany world this summer.
After publishing the findings that seemingly dead moss can regrow after being under a glacier for more than 400 years, La Farge and her team were the focus of news coverage from around the world. The irony? That wasn't initially the focus of their research.
It's another example of the importance of curiosity-driven research, she says.
La Farge, director and curator of the Cryptogamic Herbarium in the Department of Biological Sciences, was on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut in 2007 for a project on mosses and other bryophytes, looking at heavy metal pollution in the High Arctic, species variation and diversity. She saw mosses with a greenish tinge peeking out from under a glacier.
"But we were not really thinking, 'Should this regrow?'" says La Farge. "We just assumed that if it came from under the glacier, it would be dead."
The team took samples back south and dated them to the Little Ice Age. In the lab, examination of the blackened specimens showed green lateral branches.
"We need to allow people to do basic research and curiosity-driven research because that's where we're going to get dynamic new discoveries."
- Catherine La Farge
So when the team was back at the field in 2009, it collected samples of the mosses with the aim of seeing if they would regenerate. The samples were successfully recultured in the lab by master's student Krista Williams, '08 BSc.
La Farge explains that mosses, along with the rest of the bryophyte family, are known to be able to "shut down" when growth conditions aren't optimal and later "reboot."
While she didn't go into this experiment backed by industry, her findings have real-life applications. Since the discovery, she and her team have been asked to collaborate with the energy company Suncor to see if vegetation under roads will regrow when the road materials are removed.
Beyond the more tangible applications of the research, La Farge says the most important take-away from these findings is understanding the true resilience of Arctic ecosystems - and the importance of this kind of research, popularly known as blue-sky research, undertaken without having a contsrained, pre-set objective in mind.
"We need to allow people to do basic research and curiosity-driven research because that's where we're going to get dynamic new discoveries that you wouldn't necessarily get if you have to follow some mandate dictated by industry."
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