Accidental discovery of extreme life | British Antarctic Survey

February 2021. Far underneath the ice shelves of the Antarctic, there’s more life than scientists expected... During an exploratory survey, researchers drilled through 900m of ice in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf on the South Eastern Weddell Sea. 260 km away from the open ocean and 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 – like sponges and potentially several previously unknown species – attached to a boulder on the sea floor. This is the first ever record of a “hard substrate“ (eg. a boulder) community deep beneath an ice shelf - and it appears to go against all previous theories of what types of life could survive there. Given the water currents in the region, the researchers calculate that this community may be as much as 1500km upstream from the closest source of light for photosynthesis. Other organisms are also known t