Drilling half a mile under the Antarctic ice and discovering mysterious signs of life sounds like setting up a horror movie. Instead, it is the latest finding from the British Antarctic Survey, which reports that stagnant animals were first identified in the deeply inhospitable frozen environment.
The general consensus is that as you go further, the drop in temperature and the increasing pressure, the animal life is gradually pushed out of the equation. In the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf, on the southeastern Weddellsee, expectations for animals are low.
It is about 160 kilometers from the open ocean from time to time when the survey team drilled 900 meters – or almost 3000 feet – the mound was not exactly large for living things in conditions of -2.2 degrees Celsius (28F). According to a new study published in Frontiers in Marine Science, they have instead found what could be completely new species living there. The so-called hard substrate community, clinging to a mysterious rock, is the first to be recorded.
The group makes this particularly surprising, the group says in a press release that ‘it seems to be at odds with all previous theories about what kinds of life it could have survived’. The video showed organisms with filter food, which can only survive if they have a food source that is replenished via photosynthesis. However, its nearest source is potentially almost a thousand miles away.
“It is also known that other organisms collect nutrients from glacial melts or methane seepage chemicals,” the group explains, “but the researchers will not know more about these organisms until they have the tools to collect samples of these organisms – an important challenge in itself. ”
There is, after all, a reason why the depth of the ice shelf is so mysterious. This particular location is about 160 kilometers from the base ships of the British Antarctic Survey, and that is before you consider reaching the depth at which they apparently live. Floating ice shelves generally cover a vast area – the seabed below is equal to about a third of Antarctica’s continental shelf – but is relatively unexplored, with only eight previous boreholes drilled.
The community consists of what are known as sedentary organisms, such as sponges. They consume plankton that float from above and can build up biomass at high levels in continental flat areas. However, areas under floating ice shelves are much less friendly to such growth, as they are mainly cut off from daylight and hence the flowering photosynthesis that the plankton uses.
For now, there are even more questions than the scientists have answers. It is unclear how long the sedentary community has been there, or how widespread it is. Even the species of which it is composed are uncertain – “it is impossible to see whether they are glass sponges, demospongs or calcareous”, the study concludes – and whether they met there or evolved in place. What seems clearest, however, is that climate change and its impact on ice shelves could have a major and detrimental effect on these previously unknown animals, which scientists say could help explain how the first complex organisms on Earth actually evolved.