Thursday, November 14, 2024

Life Exists Under Ice That Scientists Never Thought Possible

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Up until recently, scientists thought that life couldn’t exist far beneath parts of Antarctica’s ice shelf.

That assumption has been flipped on its head with the recent discovery of sponges in an area 260 kilometers (161 miles) inside the outer edge of an Antarctic ice shelf.

According to a paper in the journal “Frontiers In Marine Science,” the established theory of life beneath the ice was that plants and animals decreased the further away you got from the ice shelf front:

“The discovery of an established community consisting of only sessile, probably filter feeding, organisms (sponges and other taxa) on a boulder 260 km from the ice front raises significant questions, especially when the local currents suggest that this community is somewhere between 625 km and 1500 km in the direction of water flow from the nearest region of photosynthesis.”

Consequently:

“This new evidence requires us to rethink our ideas with regard to the diversity of community types found under ice shelves, the key factors which control their distribution and their vulnerability to environmental change and ice shelf collapse.”

Check out the full article here.

(Image credit: Frontiers In Marine Science)

John Liang
John Lianghttps://www.deeperblue.com/
John Liang is the News Editor at DeeperBlue.com. He first got the diving bug while in High School in Cairo, Egypt, where he earned his PADI Open Water Diver certification in the Red Sea off the Sinai Peninsula. Since then, John has dived in a volcanic lake in Guatemala, among white-tipped sharks off the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, and other places including a pool in Las Vegas helping to break the world record for the largest underwater press conference.

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