Alien creatures accidentally discovered under the ice shelf of Antarctica

Far below the ice shelf of Antarctica, there is more life than expected, according to a recent study in the journal Boundaries in marine science.

During an investigative investigation, researchers drilled 900 meters of ice in the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf, in the southeastern Weddell Sea. At a distance of 260 km away from the open ocean, in total darkness and with a temperature of -2.2 ° C, very few animals have ever been observed in these conditions.

But this study is the first to discover the existence of stationary animals – similar to sponges and possibly several previously unknown species – attached to a boulder on the seabed.

“This discovery is one of the lucky accidents that pushes ideas in a different direction and shows us that Antarctic marine life is incredibly special and incredibly adapted to a frozen world,” says biogeographer and lead author, Dr Huw Griffiths of the British Antarctic Survey.

More questions than answers

“Our discovery raises so many more questions than it answers, such as how they got there. What do they eat? How long have they been there? How commonly are these boulders covered in life? Is it the same species we have outside? see “the ice shelf or are it new species? And what will happen to these communities if the ice shelf collapses?”

Floating ice shelves are the largest unexplored habitat in the Southern Ocean. It covers more than 1.5m square km of the Antarctic continental shelf, but only a total area similar to a tennis court has been studied through eight boreholes.

Current theories about how life can survive under ice racks suggest that all life becomes less as you move further away from open water and sunlight. In previous studies, there were some small mobile scavengers and predators, such as fish, worms, jellyfish or krill, in these habitats. But filter food organisms – which depend on food from above – are expected to be among the first to disappear further under the ice.

So it came as a surprise when the team of geologists, drilling through the ice to collect sediment samples, hit a rock instead of mud at the bottom of the ocean. They were even more amazed at the video recordings, in which a large rock was covered with strange creatures.

New Antarctic expedition needed

This is the first record of a hard substrate (i.e. a rock block) community deep under an ice shelf, and it seems to contradict all previous theories as to what kinds of life could have survived there.

Given the water currents in the region, the researchers calculate that this community could be as much as 1,500 km upstream of the nearest source of photosynthesis. Other organisms are also known to collect nutrients from glacier melts or methane seepage chemicals, but researchers will no longer know about these organisms until they have the tools to collect samples from these organisms – a major challenge in itself.

“To answer our questions, we need to find a way to get up close to these animals and their environment – and that’s less than 900 meters of ice, 260 km away from the ships where our labs are,” Griffiths continues. “This means that as polar scientists we will have to find new and innovative ways to study it and answer all the new questions we have.”

Griffiths and the team also note that with the climate crisis and the collapse of these ice shelves, there is little time to study and protect these ecosystems.

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