Scientists and researchers believe that when the next Ice Age occurs, sadly due to global warming currently plaguing our Earth, ancient bacteria and viruses will come back to life.

This belief was strengthen further when an eight-million-year-old bacterium, extracted from the oldest known ice on Earth, started growing in a laboratory. The said bacterium was dug by a team of researchers from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

It came from the ice found between three and five metres beneath the surface of a glacier in the Beacon and Mullins valleys of Antarctica. Aside from the eight-billion-year-old sample, four more samples were taken ranging between 100,000 and eight million years old.

"We tried to grow them in media, and the young stuff grew really fast. We could plate them and isolate colonies", commented team member Kate Bidle. Quite intriguingly, the oldest sample only contains one type of bacterium compared to the younger ones which are home to various micro-organisms. The oldest sample, furthermore, grows much slowly - only doubling in size every 70 days.

Scientist Russell Vreeland of the Ancient Biomaterials Institute at West Chester University in Pennsylvania gave this interesting comment, "This has been happening probably for a long, long time. Ice freezes and melts, rocks sink and are eroded. Microbes have been involved with this process for almost four billion years".