Saturday, June 05, 2021

More extreme life forms discovered in Antarctica under the ice shelf

Amazing stuff!

"Life finds all kinds of ways to survive extremes. Tube worms thrive in the superheated, super-sulfurous water near deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Tardigrades, also known as water bears or moss piglets, can go up to 30 years without food or water. Lichens that make their homes in the pores of sandstone survive such extremes that scientists have proposed them as possible analogs for Martian life forms.

And now, newly discovered Antarctic sea sponges are joining this rarefied group of extremophiles. Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey got a surprise when they drilled a bore hole through a half-mile thick ice shelf—and hit a boulder. Normally that’s a bad thing. But they dropped a camera down the hole (pictured above) and found something far more exciting. Beneath the ice, in total darkness and in near-freezing water, they saw a variety of animals clinging to the rock, including 16 sponges and 20 other unidentified creatures. ..."
Credits: National Geographic

"... New observations from two boreholes in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf challenge the idea that sessile organisms reduce in prevalence the further under the ice you go. 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. This new evidence requires us to rethink our ideas with regard to the diversity of community types found under ice shelves ..."

Frontiers | Breaking All the Rules: The First Recorded Hard Substrate Sessile Benthic Community Far Beneath an Antarctic Ice Shelf | Marine Science (open access)

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