Fish under Antartica's ice shelf

[Mugwump]

This month, a National Science Foundation-funded expedition began drilling through the Whillans Ice Stream, a glacier that flows from the West Antarctic Ice Shelf to the Ross Ice Shelf. The team wanted to see how the ice was faring and responding to climate change, so they drilled to the glacier?s grounding zone ? where it leaves bedrock and meets the sea.

At that zone, the sea bottom looks bare and "rocky, like a lunar surface," glacial geologist Ross Powell told Douglas Fox for Scientific American. They sent a little underwater vehicle called Deep-SCINI down the borehole to investigate. Its cameras would capture images of the rocks and sediment down on the sea floor. The researchers took sediment cores and seawater samples, which betrayed only the presence of a few microbes ? no sign of crustaceans or other life normally found at the bottom of the sea.

This wasn?t a surprise: Under 2,428 feet of ice and 528 miles from the edge of the ice shelf, the site is far from any hint of sunlight, the energy source that typically powers marine food webs. So the next thing they found was shocking.


http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/fish-live-under-antarcticas-ice-shelf-where-it-seems-they-shouldnt-survive-180954000/?no-ist

[PaulineMi]

That's interesting.  Here's a strange one that was linked to the article you found....

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/microbes-breathe-and-eat-electricity-make-us-re-think-what-life-180953883/

[Mugwump]

That's interesting.  Here's a strange one that was linked to the article you found....

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/microbes-breathe-and-eat-electricity-make-us-re-think-what-life-180953883/

I saw that too....Smithsonian has some great articles, don't they...?

[BillT]

There are also some lakes in Antarctica, way down under the ice.
Several teams are drilling down to them to sample whats there.
The Russians did it first.