From Reuters a little SciFi come to life. They discovered a bacteria that was frozen for about 30,000 years in Alaska and lived. Couple this with the newly discovered frozen ice plateus on Mars and you get a SciFi writer's fantasy come true. The mere possibility that even unicellular life could exist as close to home as Mars is, I think, rather extrordinary, but then I'm a SciFi geek myself. However, the chances are slim at best. According to the article in Reuters it seems that the Mars atmosphere is so light that liquid water currently can't really exist. Ice sublimates straight to gas without even passing through a liquid phase. Think of that cool dry ice that they used for the spooky scene in your high school play. The only reason that the remaining ice plateus are still around is because of an ashy covering they've somehow acquired along the way. The theory is that if Martian bacterial life were to be found that it would have had to have evolved with access to liquid water. At one point it's believed that Mars was able to support liquid water otherwise how did the ice plateus get there in the first place. But, what happened exactly to create such a change in atmospheric pressure? Could life continue frozen even with this catasrophic change? If the same event caused the change in pressure as caused the entire ocean to freeze possibly not. If they were independant events or enough removed in time maybe. Don't forget though this involves a lot of other 'ifs'. If the ice is actually water ice and not some other substance, if life ever did evolve on Mars, if even one species evolved like the new species found in Alaska with the ability to live through a 30,000 frozen period.