Discovery: Fish Live beneath Antarctica Stunned researchers in Antarctica have discovered fish and other aquatic animals living in perpetual darkness and cold, beneath a roof of ice 740 meters thick. The animals inhabit a wedge of seawater only 10 meters deep, sealed between the ice above and a barren, rocky seafloor below—a location so remote and hostile the many scientists expected to find nothing but scant microbial life. A team of ice drillers and scientists made the discovery after lowering a small, custom-built robot down a narrow hole they bored through the Ross Ice Shelf, a slab of glacial ice the size of France that hangs off the coastline of Antarctica and floats on the ocean. The remote water they tapped sits beneath the back corner of the floating shelf, where the shelf meets what would be the shore of Antarctica if all that ice were removed. The spot sits 850 kilometers from the outer edge of the ice shelf, the nearest place where the ocean is in contact with sunlight that allows tiny plankton to grow and sustain a food chain. “I’m surprised,” says Ross Powell, a 63-year old glacial geologist from Northern Illinois University who co-led the expedition with two other scientists. Powell spoke with me via satellite phone from the remote location on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where 40 scientists, ice drillers and technicians were dropped by ski-mounted planes. “I’ve worked in this area for my whole career,” he says—studying the underbellies where glaciers flow into oceans. “You get the picture of these areas having very little food, being desolate, not supporting much life.” The ecosystem has somehow managed to survive incredibly far from sunlight, the source of energy that drives most life on Earth. The discovery provides insight into what kind of complex but undiscovered life might inhabit the vast areas beneath Antarctica’s ice shelves—comprising more than a million square kilometers of unexplored seafloor. The first low-resolution image of a translucent fish that researchers discovered incredibly far beneath Antarctica’s ice reveals two black eyes and various internal organs (colored blobs). Credit: Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling Project The expedition, funded by the National Science Foundation, had ventured to this location to investigate the history and long-term stability of the Whillans Ice Stream, a major glacier that flows off the coast of Antarctica and feeds into the Ross Ice Shelf. The expedition began in December as tractors towed massive sleds holding more than 400 metric tons of fuel and equipment to a remote location 630 kilometers from the South Pole and 1,000 kilometers from the nearest permanent base. Read more at: scientificamerican/article/discovery-fish-live-beneath-antarctica/
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 03:53:53 +0000
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