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Discovery of life beneath Antarctica’s ice shelves | |
admin | |
2021-02-15 | |
发布年 | 2021 |
语种 | 英语 |
国家 | 英国 |
领域 | 资源环境 |
正文(英文) | Far underneath the ice shelves of the Antarctic, there’s more life than expected, finds a recent study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, published this week (15 February 2021). During an exploratory survey, researchers drilled through 900 m of ice in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, situated on the South Eastern Weddell Sea. At a distance of 260 km 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 – like sponges and potentially several previously unknown species – attached to a boulder on the sea floor.
Floating ice shelves represent the greatest unexplored habitat in the Southern Ocean. They cover more that 1.5 million km2 of the Antarctic continental shelf, but only a total area of around the size of a tennis court has been studied through eight prior boreholes. Current theories on what life could survive under ice shelves suggest that all life becomes less abundant as you move further away from open water and sunlight. Past studies have found some small mobile scavengers and predators, such as fish, worms, jellyfish or krill, in these habitats. But filter feeding organisms–which depend on a supply of food from above–were expected to be amongst the first to disappear further under the ice. So, it came as a surprise when the team of geologists, drilling through the ice to collect sediment samples, hit a rock instead of mud at the bottom of the ocean below. They were even more surprised by the video footage, which showed a large boulder covered in strange creatures.
This is the first ever record of a hard substrate (i.e. 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 1500 km upstream from the closest source of photosynthesis. Other organisms are also known to collect nutrients from glacial melts or chemicals from methane seeps, but the researchers won’t know more about these organisms until they have the tools to collect samples of these organisms–a significant challenge in itself.
Griffiths and the team also note that with climate change and the collapse of these ice shelves, time is running out to study and protect these ecosystems. Breaking All the Rules: The First Recorded Hard Substrate Sessile Benthic Community Far Beneath an Antarctic Ice Shelf by Huw J. Griffiths, Paul Anker, Katrin Linse, Jamie Maxwell, Alexandra L. Post, Craig Stevens, Slawek Tulaczyk and James A. Smith is published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. |
URL | 查看原文 |
来源平台 | British Antarctic Survey |
文献类型 | 新闻 |
条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/314949 |
专题 | 资源环境科学 |
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | admin. Discovery of life beneath Antarctica’s ice shelves. 2021. |
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