German scientists have uncovered a treasure of aquatic life deep beneath the Antarctic ice sheets. Ice shelves, while covering approximately 1.6 million square kilometres, are of the least investigated habitats on the planet. Cameras have captured life in these continuously dark and cold settings but have rarely been collected.
In 2018, a group of German researchers bored two holes through roughly 200 metres of the Ekström Ice Shelf in the southern Weddell Sea using hot water. With temperatures as low as minus 2.2 degrees Celsius, the atmosphere is hard and exceedingly cold.
The biodiversity of the items they found was extraordinarily great, despite being several kilometres from the open sea. According to the researchers, it is richer than many open water samples discovered on the continental shelf where light and food sources are plentiful.
The scientists uncovered 77 species, more than the entire number previously known from all of the frozen continent’s ice shelf, including sabre-shaped bryozoans (moss creatures) and serpulid worms.
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According to the researchers, there must be enough algae moved beneath the ice shelf from the open ocean to support a healthy food web. The yearly development of four of the species was strikingly close to that of similar organisms in open marine Antarctic shelf environments.
As per scientists, time is running out to research and safeguard these ecosystems due to climate change and the loss of these ice shelves.
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