Best of Memories

Asia’s rich and varied history is marked with countless significant events that have shaped the fates of individual nations as well as our collective futures. Here, we bring you some of the most unforgettable events we have researched and written about over the last 20 years

Asia’s rich and varied history is marked with countless significant events that have shaped the fates of individual nations as well as our collective futures. Here, we bring you some of the most unforgettable events we have researched and written about over the last 20 years

Revisited

No.104 Issue 3/2014

Title

Frozen Secrets

Sowing seeds of the past

Text

Selina Tan

At almost 32,000 years old, the recently regenerated narrow-leaf campion (Silene stenophylla Ledeb.), native to Siberia, stands as the longest living multicellular organism on Earth. An extant species of flowering plant in the family Caryophyllaceae, it sprouts from the oldest viable seed in the world – thought to have vanished together with the mammoth steppe ecosystem about 13,000 years ago. Amazingly, it was the ground squirrel’s (Urocitellus parryii) perpetually cold, dry, hoarding environment that preserved the S. stenophylla’s fruit tissues. The animals’ burrows were located on the banks of the lower Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia, 40 metres below the current surface of the tundra. According to researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences, the sediments were firmly cemented together and often filled with ice. Squirrels dug the frozen ground, putting in hay and animal fur for a perfect storage chamber, creating a natural allowance for cyroresistance of plant placental tissue. Such mechanisms demonstrate a critical role for permafrost as a depository for preexisting life, hypothetically long disappeared from the face of the Earth.