BY: DAVID LAO

The northern reaches of the Canadian Arctic, a barren, beautiful land freezing with life and surprising diversity. There exists a multitude of species up in the North – seals, polar bears, narwhals, House Stark. There is, however, another form of life there, neither animal nor medieval faction, but a plant – a 400 year old one that has come back from the dead.

While on an expedition, a team from the University of Alberta detected something underneath the ice of the Teardrop Glacier, a big chunk of dense frozen ice in the north.

“We ended up walking along the edge of the glacier margin and we saw these huge populations coming out from underneath the glacier that seemed to have a greenish tint,” said Catherine La Farge, the lead author of the study to BBC.

Looking further into the emerald-coloured anomaly, the researchers found samples of plants known as Bryophytes – plants that have no vascular tissue to pump fluids to the rest of their bio-degradable bodies. Bringing the greenery in for study, the researchers noticed that while they were transporting them, the plants began to reconstruct.

“When we looked at them in detail and brought them to the lab, I could see some of the stems actually had new growth of green lateral branches, and that said to me that these guys are regenerating in the field, and that blew my mind,” La Farge told BBC News.

The plants, which were uncovered in 2013 by the team were uncovered partially due to the receding glaciers in the area – the melting of which has been rapidly accelerating since 2004. The rates of which are about 3-to-4 metres per year. The land which was exposed by the mass thawing was frozen during the so called “Little Ice Age,” a prolonged period of climate reduction that ran from A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1850.

Parts of the glacier which had not previously been exposed until just recently, allowed the the researchers to find their self-rejuvenating green zombies.

“If you think of ice sheets covering the landscape, we’ve always thought that plants have to come in from refugia around the margins of an ice system, never considering land plants as coming out from underneath a glacier,” said La Farge to BBC News.

Teardrop Glacier, which is located at Sverdup Pass is uncovering a vast amount of life not previously known due to the receding ice.

“It’s a whole world of what’s coming out from underneath the glaciers that really needs to be studied,” Dr La Farge told BBC News.