Scientists believe that the Antarctic seabed will be barren. But it’s full of life

When crew members on board the Marine Science Expedition learned that the Chicago-sized iceberg had broken from the Antarctic ice shelf, they knew they had to stop working immediately and check it out.

After all, it offers a unique opportunity to explore the seabed that had previously cut into human marine areas.

Despite their excitement, the team on board Schmidt Ocean Academy did not think they would find too much life under the ice, far beyond the sun.

It turns out that they were wrong.

Patricia Esquete, chief scientist of the expedition, said the first image of the distant vehicle that discovered the ship revealed a sea sponge with crabs crawling on it.

“It’s very exciting,” she told happen Host Neil Coxer. “And then, hour by hour, every day, we keep seeing more.”

Esquete and her colleagues document an amazingly lush, diverse marine ecosystem that includes corals, sponges, fish, giant sea spiders, octopus, octopus, and more, some of which may be new to science.

But, for the life of so many lives in the depths of the dark sea, about 1,300 meters below the George VI ice shelf, it remains a mystery.

Now, it is not clear that this ecosystem will fundamentally change due to the loss of ice.

“It’s a very interesting discovery and I can’t wait to see all new species discover biodiversity in these ecosystems,” said Guadalupe Bribiesca-Contreras, an applied scientist at the National Centre for Oceanography in England, who is not involved in the expedition.

Esquete, a deep-sea ecologist and taxonomicist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, said the crew saw a new iceberg breaking in from George Vi through satellite images in January to explore along the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula along the ocean floor on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula.

“We immediately knew we had to go there to explore that particular area,” she said. “Our expectation is a very poor ecosystem because it is often the marine ecosystem fed by the energy of the sun.”

This is true even at the deepest depths, as the nutrients of photosynthetic organisms slowly rain to maintain the ecosystem below.

But for centuries, the area has been covered with a thickness of nearly 150 meters. Before this, the ice was so thick that it hit the seabed.

“This means photosynthesis doesn’t happen … and food doesn’t produce,” Esquite said. “So we expect some forms of life to be fed through the trend of food transported horizontally, but we expect too much.”

If food and energy don’t rain from above, then are there motivation and feeding this area in life?

“It’s really the most exciting research we can do,” Esquite said.

The team collected images, along with some specimens and geological samples. Scientists will study the geology of the region, as well as the ocean currents, in an attempt to bother “the way the entire system works.”

But the first step will be to classify all the organisms they observe, Esquete said.

“So, a complete morphological study was conducted on all the species we found, and then genetic analysis,” she said.

She suspects dozens of them may be newbies in science.

“us In a rarely explored area. And we know that when you explore the deep sea, when you sample the deep sea, you always discover new species. ”

Although the iceberg calved when and where, it was accidental for the crew, it was not nothing. Ice sheets have been melting and shrinking for decades due to climate change.

Verena Tunnicliffe, a marine biologist at the University of Victoria who is not involved in the expedition, wants to know how this newly discovered ecosystem will change.

“They took this opportunity to explore the world that has been hiding under extremely thick ice for thousands of years,” said Tunnicliffe, president of Canadian research at Deep Ocean Research Canada.

“This expedition was able to create a set of ‘baseline’ data: original habitats and ecosystems. How it will change now.

Meanwhile, Esquete excitedly uncovered some mysterious oceans.

“What makes the life array possible is something we really want to know,” she said.