Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Whether it’s the ocean’s deepest hydrothermal vents or tall mountain peaks, bacteria is likely surviving and thriving. Ice caves can host a wide variety of microorganisms and offer biologists a bevy of genetic diversity that still has to be studied. And it could help save lives. A team of scientists in Romania tested antibiotic resistance profiles with a bacterial strain that was hidden in a 5,000-year-old layer of ice inside an underground ice cave. This bacteria may be key to finding new strategies to prevent the continued rise of antibiotic resistance. The new bacterial strain called Psychrobacter SC65A.3 is detailed in a study published today in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology. “The Psychrobacter SC65A.3 bacterial strain isolated from Scărişoara Ice Cave, despite its ancient origin, shows resistance to multiple modern antibiotics and carries over 100 resistance-related genes,” Dr. Cristina Purcarea, a study co-author and microbiologist at the Institute of Biology Bucharest of the Romanian Academy, said in a statement. …