A team of researchers, including Boyd, later discovered that through a series of physical and chemical processes, hydrogen gas is produced as the silica-rich bedrock underneath glaciers is ground into tiny mineral particles by the weight of the ice on top of it. When those mineral particles combine with glacial meltwater, they let off hydrogen.What became even more fascinating to Boyd and Dunham was that microbial communities under the glaciers could combine that hydrogen gas with carbon dioxide to generate more organic matter, called biomass, through a process called chemosynthesis. Chemosynthesis is similar to how plants generate biomass from carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, although chemosynthesis does not require sunlight. To learn more about what those chemosynthetic microbes were doing, Dunham used samples of sediment from the glaciers in Canada and Iceland. He grew samples of the living organisms found in the sediment in a laboratory, watching them over several months to see if they would continue to grow in the simulated environment.

Over months of preparing and observing the microbial cultures, Dunham found that not only was it possible to track the communities’ growth in the lab environment but also that the type of bedrock underlying a glacier influenced how much hydrogen gas was produced, which in turn led to the presence of microbial communities that were better adapted to metabolizing hydrogen. Samples taken from the Kötlujökull Glacier in Iceland, which sits atop basaltic bedrock, produced much more hydrogen gas than the samples from Robertson Glacier in Alberta, Canada, which has carbonate bedrock beneath it. As they use that hydrogen gas to generate energy, said Boyd, the microbes also pull carbon dioxide out of the air to create biomass, replicate and grow. That ability to “fix” carbon is a critical climate regulation process, another similarity to photosynthesis in plants.

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