Beneath the icy armor of Antarctica, in a cave as large as a huge cathedral, are flocks of tiny animals reminiscent of miniature shrimp, part of an ecosystem that has hitherto been an ice-locked secret.
According to the Guardian, New Zealand scientists have discovered this ecosystem 500 meters below the ice in an estuary that is several hundred kilometers from the edge of Ross’ ice sheet. Namely, they suspected before that there was a network of freshwater rivers or lakes under the ice, but they did not directly discover them.
The goal of this scientific mission was to find out what role such estuaries under ice play in melting ice sheets caused by climate change, but when they broke the ice and reached the river, the camera was surrounded by amphipods, tiny animals only a few millimeters in size.
“For a while, we thought something was wrong with the camera, but when we fixed the focus, we discovered flocks of arthropods,” said Craig Stevens of the National Institute of Water and Atmosphere (NIWA).
He said they explored other parts of the ice sheet and assumed they knew how things stood, but that these were big surprises.
“We were overwhelmed because those animals meant there was an important ecosystem,” Stevens said.
Huw Horgan of the University of Wellington described how researching and analyzing that river under ice was like being the first to enter a hidden world. They left instruments in the river to discover what makes this water unique.