Scientists thought that this antarctic sea bottom would be sterile. But it is teeming with life

When the crew aboard an oceanic science expedition, he learned that an iceberg of the Chicago size had stopped from an Antarctic ice platform, they knew they had to stop what they were doing immediately and go to take a look.

After all, he offered a unique opportunity to explore the bottom of the sea in an ocean area previously interrupted for humans.

Despite their excitement, the team of the Schmidt Ocean Institute ship did not think of finding a lot of life so far under the ice, well beyond the scope of the sun.

It turns out that they were wrong dead.

The first image that came to the ship’s control room from the team remotely revealed a large seafood sponge with a crab that crawled, says Patricia Esquete, the chief scientist of the expedition at the time of discovery.

“It was a lot of excitement, “he said How it happens It hosts Nil Köksal. “So, now for now and day by day, we continued to see more.”

Esquete and his colleagues have documented a surprisingly lush and diversified marine ecosystem that includes corals, sponges, fish, gigantic marine spiders, octopus and more, some of which are probably new to science.

But it remains a mystery of how much life could have thrown in the depths of the dark ocean, about 1,300 meters under the George VI ice platform, one of the massive floating glaciers attached to the glacial cap of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Furthermore, it is not clear what will happen to this ecosystem now that it has been basically modified by the loss of that ice.

“It is a very interesting discovery and I can’t wait to see all the new discoveries and to understand what biodiversity keeps in these ecosystems,” said Guadalupe Bribiesca-Contreras, a scientist applied to the National Oceanography Center of England, which was not involved in the expedition.

Esquete, an ecologist and taxonomist of Deepsea at the University of Portugal of Aveiro, says that the crew was exploring the oceanic floors of the sea of ​​Bellingshausen along the west side of the Antarctic peninsula in January when they saw, through satellite images, that a new iceberg was breaking from George VI.

“We immediately knew we had to go there and explore that particular area,” he said. “Our expectations were a very depleted ecosystem because, you know, normally a marine ecosystem is fueled by the energy of the sun”.

This is also true in the deepest depths, since the nutrients of the photosyntifying organisms rain slowly to support the ecosystems below.

But for centuries, this region has been covered with ice of about 150 meters thick. Before then, the ice was so often that the bottom of the ocean is touched.

“This means that photosynthesis cannot happen … and food will not be produced,” Esquete said. “So we expected some forms of life fueled by the food that were transported laterally by the currents, but we didn’t expect much.”

If food and energy rains from above, what has fueled and fed this region that teems with life?

“It will really be the most exciting research we can do,” said Esquete.

The team collected images, as well as some samples and geological samples. Scientists will examine the geology of the region, as well as the ocean currents, to try to express “how the entire system works,” he said.

But the first step, says Esquete, will be to classify all the creatures they have observed.

“So a morphological study complete with all the species we have found and then genetic analysis,” he said.

Suspected that dozens of them can be new for science.

“Us They were in an area that was very little explored. And we know that when the deep sea expresses, when you champion the deep sea, you always find new species “.

While Iceberg birth when and where he did he was fortuitous for the crew, he did not come out of nowhere. The glacial cap melts and reduces for decades due to climate change.

The marine biologist of the University of Victoria Verena Tunnicliffe, who has not been involved in the expedition, wonders how this ecosystem just discovered will change now that it has been exposed.

“They caught a very unusual opportunity to explore a world that has been hidden under ice extremely often for thousands of years,” said Tunnicliffe, president of the research in Canada in Deep Ocean Research.

“This shipment is able to create a series of” basal “data: the original habitat and ecosystem. And how will the curtain now be pulled back? We hope it will remain accessible in the coming years to measure the changes, thus understanding the unique conditions below the ice often.”

In the meantime, Esquete is excited to reveal some marine mysteries.

“What makes that series of life possible is something we really want to understand,” he said.