An ecosystem has been discovered, quite by accident, thriving under the Antarctic ice.
Scientists had been videoing glacial features in the water beneath the collapsed Larsen ice shelf. “We suddenly saw evidence of these organisms that nobody had reported before,” says Scott Ishman from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.
Ishman and his team discovered mud volcanoes, a thin bacterial mat and a thriving clam community. Hidden from the sun for 12,000 years by the ice sheet, the ecosystem is fed by subterranean chemical energy rather than by photosynthesis. This is the only such system found flourishing in such extreme cold.…
