Unexpected Life: Strange Creatures Accidentally Discovered Far Beneath Antarctica’s Ice Shelves
SciTechDaily | 2/14/2021Far underneath the ice shelves of the Antarctic, there’s more life than expected, finds a recent study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.
During an exploratory survey, researchers drilled through 900 meters of ice in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, situated on the south eastern Weddell Sea. At a distance of 260km away from the open ocean, under complete darkness and with temperatures of -2.2°C, very few animals have ever been observed in these conditions.
But this study is the first to discover the existence of stationary animals — similar to sponges and potentially several previously unknown species — attached to a boulder on the seafloor.
“This discovery is one of those fortunate accidents that pushes ideas in a different direction and shows us that Antarctic marine life is incredibly special and amazingly adapted to a frozen world,” says biogeographer and lead author, Dr. Huw Griffiths of British Antarctic Survey.
“Our discovery raises so many more questions than it answers, such as how did they get there? What are they eating? How long have they been there? How common are these boulders covered in life? Are these the same species as we see outside the ice shelf or are they new species? And what would happen to these communities if the ice shelf collapsed?”
Previously settled science marches on!
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Oddly they also found some unsent ballots marked for Biden as well.
What good is it to have fences, razor wire, and thousands of soldiers surrounding the Capitol if the politicians can just come and go as they please?
They are not there to police the politicians, they are there to police the common herd. Mainly they are there because the politicians are scared. You see it’s okay for thugs, anarchists, and so called revolutionaries to rip our cities apart as they did all of last summer. That’s no problem, but when they bring it to Washington DC, when they bring it to the doorstep of the politicians, well that’s completely unacceptable. For the politicians there’s a lot of difference between a mob tearing up Portland and a mob wandering the halls of congress yelling where’s Nancy…it scares them.