The chief geologist James Smith of the British Antarctic Research made a study in Antarctica and it appears he discovered something very strange.
The research video shows an ice descent to a depth of 900 meters, which ends abruptly, leading to something truly incredible.
When Griffiths (Smith's colleague) who is a biologist, watched the video of the research, he noticed a kind of film on the rock, probably a layer of bacteria known as a microbial mat. An alien sponge and other animals hung from the rock, while more stable, cylindrical sponges hugged the surface. The rock was also covered in smart threads, perhaps a component of bacterial mats – or perhaps a strange animal known as a hydrid.
The rock Smith accidentally analyzed is 160 miles (260 kilometers) from daylight—that is, the closest edge where the ice ends and the open ocean begins. It’s too far from the nearest possible food source—a spot that has enough sunlight to fuel an ecosystem and is in the right position relative to the rock—for known currents—to provide these creatures with food.
The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.
We can safely say that these animals live in total darkness, which is fine – many deep-sea creatures do the same. But animals that exist on the sea floor must rely on a fairly steady supply in the form of “marine snow.” Every living creature that swims in the water must one day die, and when it does, it will sink to the ocean. As the corpses sink and decompose, other creatures pick them up and throw away the particles that accumulate even in the deepest depths.
This works in most parts of Antarctica, where the waters are incredibly “rich.” Plankton feed on all kinds of fish, which feed large marine mammals like seals. All this activity produces debris—and dead animals—that one day become marine snow.
But the Antarctic creatures on this particular rock don't live under a busy area of water. They live under 3,000 feet of ice in Antarctica. And they can't wander far from their rock in search of food. Researchers think it's possible that the slope of this sea ice has tipped over on its side, so the food source is moving horizontally instead of vertically.
But because the researchers were unable to collect samples, they cannot yet say exactly what these sponges and marine creatures eat. Also, it is not clear how these animals got there. One scenario is that their parents lived on a rock hundreds of kilometers away and released their sperm and eggs, which traveled in the currents.
Because Griffiths and his colleagues were unable to collect samples, they also cannot say how old these animals are. The appropriate sponges are known to live for thousands of years, so it is likely that this is a truly ancient ecosystem. Perhaps the rock has been seeded with life long ago, but the currents have revived it with additional life over the millennia.
The researchers also can't say whether this rock is an anomaly or whether such ecosystems are actually common under the ice in Antarctica. Perhaps the geologists weren't just extremely lucky when they dropped the camera on the rock—perhaps these animal communities are a regular feature of the Antarctic seafloor.
Source of information: wired.com
