Antarctic is home to life giving nitrogen microbes
Nov
17
A key building block of life, they can pull N2 gas out the air or from water and convert it into ammonium, a process called nitrogen fixation, according to Deborah Bronk, a chemical oceanographer of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine.
Nitrogen fixing was previously believed to only be possible in warmer climates. A separate but related study made similar findings reported just two days earlier in The Scientist by Naomi Harada, a geochemist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and co-author Takuhei Shiozaki. They found cyanobacterium UCYN-A was the major diazotroph, previously believed to only be found in tropical regions, according to Shiozaki.
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/nitrogen-fixing-microbes-found-in-antarctic-sea-68099/amp