After spending more than 1,500 years in ice, an Antarctic moss bank continues to grow, researchers found.

Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and Reading University have shown that moss, a vital part of the ecosystem in both Polar Regions, have the ability to survive century to millennial scale ice ages, which provides exciting new insight into the survival of life on Earth, researchers said.

"It's basically the first record of anything regenerating of that sort of age," said the survey's Peter Convey, co-author of the report in Current Biology. "There are records of microbes being pulled out of ice cores and permafrost, but nothing that's multicellular has ever been recorded to do it."

For the study, researchers took cores of moss from deep in a frozen moss bank in the Antarctic. The moss would already have been at least decades old when it was first frozen, according to a press release. They sliced the frozen moss cores very carefully, keeping them free from contamination, and placed them in an incubator at a normal growth temperature and light level.

After only a few weeks, the moss began to grow. Using carbon dating, the team identified the moss to be at least 1,530 years of age, and possibly even older, at the depth where the new growth was seen.

"This experiment shows that multi-cellular organisms, plants in this case, can survive over far longer timescales than previously thought. These mosses, a key part of the ecosystem, could survive century to millennial periods of ice advance, such as the Little Ice Age in Europe," Convey said. "If they can survive in this way, then recolonization following an ice age, once the ice retreats, would be a lot easier than migrating trans-oceanic distances from warmer regions. It also maintains diversity in an area that would otherwise be wiped clean of life by the ice advance."

Convey said this discovery raises the possibility of complex life forms surviving even longer periods once encased in permafrost or ice.