Wildlife

Unimaginable diversity of life discovered beneath Antarctic ice shelf

Deep beneath Antarctica’s ice shelves, researchers have discovered dozens of life-forms thriving on a tiny patch of the seafloor —— an unprecedented level of species diversity for an environment that has never seen sunlight.

Far below Antarctic ice, shielded from the energizing rays of the sun, life can exist, but it was thought to be rare. As most ecosystems are built on a foundation of photosynthetic organisms like plants or algae, such dark realms shouldn’t have enough food to support a wide variety of life.

But when Gerhard Kuhn and Raphael Gromig of the Alfred Wegener Institute used boiling hot water to bore through 656 feet (200 meters) of ice on the Ekström Ice Shelf, they were surprised by what they were able to scoop from the seafloor another 328 (100 m) down.

Barnes identified 77 different species, far more than he should have reasonably found. This one sample was even richer with species than he would have expected from a survey of the open shelf. Many of the species identified were bryozoans, or stationary filter feeders that often look like a brain or moss, such as Melicerita obliqua and tube-feeding worms such as Paralaeospira sicula, among others.

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