Ice covers 10% of the Earths continent (16, 000 000 km2) but are shrinking. The surface melting occurs annually in up to 5% of the ice (800 000 km2) and this number is growing. The consequence of global warming are strongest in the polar region, and therefore ice environments in polar region are warming more rapidly than the ice at lower latitudes. This will results in 33 million km3 of freshwater melting. The consequence if all this ice melts is that the sea-level will raise by 70m. Glacial environments including Polar region, frozen lakes, mountain glaciers, and upper atmosphere, are currently the focus of intense research due to their recognized vulnerability to climate change and the increased interest in psychrophilic microorganisms due to their great biotechnological potential. However there is only limited information available on ice microbiota on ice caves. These highly conserved and relatively unexposed environments constitute archives for studying the impact of climate and anthropogenic pollution on the diversity of the ice embedded microbial communities as well as on their metabolic activity. In an ongoing EraNetLAC project funded by EU and NRC we are collaborating with colleagues in Romania, Argentina and Chile on studying Ice Cave Microbiomes (CAVEICE). The project has 5 partners form 4 countries; two Romanian partners, one Norwegian partner, one Argentinian partner and one Chilean partner. All research teams comprise scientists specialized in microbial ecology of extreme environments. In addition the Institute of Biology in Bucharesti (Romanian) and University of Bergen (Norway) has an extensive competence and are specialized in paleogeochemistry. The ongoing project represents a comparative study of ice environments, where the sample system from Norway and Romania are glacier ice inside caves whereas the sample sites from Chile and Argentina are focusing on Ice caves from glacier. In the Norwegian part of the project we focus on the Svarhamar Ice cave in Fauske, Norway which is a perennial ice mass hosted within a karst cave, processing the largest caves in Scandinavia and one of its lowest altitude ice cave in Europe. This cave is directly comparable to the Scariosara Cave from Romania, which contains the oldest and largest subterranean ice block in the worlds (Persoiu, 2011). During 2015 and 2016 ice samples have been collected from all the ice caves and glacial ice, and we are in the middle of sampling processing. The samples were collected for ice up to 800 years old from the Svarthamar Ice cave (Norway) and more than 1000 years old for the Scarisoara glacier ice. The ice from the Argentinian and Chilean has still not been dated, but are under progress. The ice samples are subjected for isotope analyses, for C14 dating and for microbiological community profiling. The preliminary data are highly promising and very exciting. There seems to be a high biomass present in the old ice samples and also the diversity of organisms looks surprisingly high. We can see a shift in the community composition along the chrono sequences suggesting that there are possibilities to follow diversification and evolution over time. Also samples that has been deposited as long as 900 years back, shows growth of organisms when we cultivate the samples in the laboratory.
