Two-million-year-old microbial communities from the Kap København Formation in North Greenland
Abstract
We reconstructed bacterial, archaeal, and viral communities from two-million-year-old sediments from the Kap København Formation in North Greenland. Using a novel analytical framework integrating taxonomic profiling, DNA damage estimates, and functional reconstructions, we distinguished pioneer microbial communities from later permafrost assemblages. The damaged DNA fraction represented approximately 84% of estimated relative abundances across samples. We identified methanogenic archaea consistent with a warmer, non-permafrost palustrine wetland environment and discovered methanogens exhibiting high sequence similarity to contemporary thawing permafrost analogues.