Fish found living beneath Antarctica

Fish found living beneath Antarctica
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Highlights

In a ground-breaking discovery, glacial geologists in Antarctica have discovered fish and other aquatic animals living in perpetual darkness and cold - beneath a 740-metre-thick roof. The animals inhabit a wedge of seawater only 10 metres deep, sealed between the ice above and a barren, rocky seafloor below. The location is so remote and hostile that scientists expected to find nothing but scant microbial life, the scientific journal Nature reported.

Washington: In a ground-breaking discovery, glacial geologists in Antarctica have discovered fish and other aquatic animals living in perpetual darkness and cold - beneath a 740-metre-thick roof. The animals inhabit a wedge of seawater only 10 metres deep, sealed between the ice above and a barren, rocky seafloor below. The location is so remote and hostile that scientists expected to find nothing but scant microbial life, the scientific journal Nature reported.

"I am surprised. The discovery provides insight into what kind of complex but undiscovered life might inhabit the vast areas beneath Antarctica's ice shelves comprising more than a million square kms of unexplored seafloor," said Ross Powell, glacial geologist from Northern Illinois University, who co-led the expedition with two other scientists.

The team of ice drillers and scientists made the discovery after lowering a small, custom-built robot down a narrow hole they bored through the Ross Ice Shelf - a slab of glacial ice the size of France that hangs off the coastline of Antarctica and floats on the ocean. The remote water they tapped sits beneath the back corner of the floating shelf, where the shelf meets what would be the shore of Antarctica if all that ice were removed.

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