Confirming that there is still a mysterious piece of the Earth’s biosphere that we have not yet encountered, scientists with the British Antarctic Survey were recently involved in drilling a polar ice core for sediment samples on the Filchner-Ronne Antarctica Ice Shelf and that they knowingly discovered an entire ecosystem living on the boulder floor.
What is remarkable about this amazing discovery is that these sea creatures, which included unknown species of sponges and starchy marine animals, should not be able to survive nearly a mile below the surface of the ice shelf in complete darkness with no recognizable food supply … yet there they were!
According to Wired, to conduct the planned experiments examining the history of the half-mile-thick ice shelf, geologist James Smith of the British Antarctic Survey spent three months in sub-zero weather camping in a tent. while on a frozen table of unmistakable -dried food.
After several attempts to collect sediment down through the 3,000-foot drill hole in the ice using a sampling device attached to a GoPro camera, Smith and his colleagues were unsuccessful. However, after reassembling and scanning the film, they realized that their equipment was smoking against a large rock that sat an additional 1,300 feet below, instead of seabed.
“It’s like a bloody hell!” Smith says. “It’s just one big boulder in the middle of a relatively flat shore. It’s not as if the seabed is full of these things. “
British Antarctic Survey biologist Huw Griffiths re-examined the recovered video images and marveled at what he saw on this great stone hunt. The rock was covered with a layer of bacteria called a microbial mat, which was home to alien-looking sponges, a collection of strange starchy animals, cylindrical sponges, and clever filaments believed to be like a type of animal called a hydroid.
This invisible harbor is 160 miles from sunlight, which is where the ice shelf ends and an open ocean begins. This is literally hundreds of miles from the nearest reliable food source, where daylight would normally nourish a healthy ecosystem.
“It’s not the most interesting rock – if you don’t know where it is,” said Griffiths, lead author of a new paper published in the online journal Frontiers in Marine Science. “Now that you know, it means your panic may be somewhere near the floor right now.”
Animals living “sessile” (stuck in one place) on the deep seabed, in daylight or zero, must rely on a regular supply of food in the form of “sea snow. ”Eventually, all living groups calling for water environments in their home will escape and sink to the bottom where they will rot into tidbits and bits that will be floating buffets. which eventually accumulates on even the most remote of the seabed.
“The worst thing about a place where there’s not a lot of food, and it’s very sporadic, is to have something that’s locked up on the spot,” Griffiths said.
To answer some of the mystery, Grffiths and Smith argue that this dark little world may have been the result of an anomaly in the usual kind of “sea snow” nutrient flows. Here in this alien environment, the marine smorgasbord seems to have operated in a horizontal manner rather than the traditional vertical level.
Examining conventional records around the official drill site, the British researchers concluded that there are an abundance of food sources between 390 and 930 miles away. A stream of organic matter moving among these streams may be enough to feed these hungry creatures, even though it is almost unbelievable when considering the long distance.
Further theories will be explored by the British Antarctic Study, but Rich Mooi, an expert on Antarctic marine life at the California Academy of Sciences, argues that it may not be that long when he understands the complexity of Antarctic waters are the engine that runs the Earth’s ocean currents. .
“It sinks to the seabed and pushes water out, rising out of Antarctica,” says Mooi. “And these streams are the germ of many – if not all of the conventional systems on the planet. ”