On the flip sideNew species of sea anemone found underneath Ross Ice ShelfPosted January 24, 2014
National Science Foundation "The pictures blew my mind, it was really an amazing find," said Marymegan Daly The team made the astonishing discovery of thousands upon thousands of the small anemones. The new species, discovered in late December 2010, was publicly identified for the first time in an article published last month in PLOS ONE, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal published by the Public Library of Science Though other sea anemones have been found in Antarctica, the newly discovered species is the first reported to live in ice. They also live upside down, hanging from the ice, compared to other sea anemones that live on or in the seafloor. The white anemones have been named Edwardsiella andrillae, in honor of the ANDRILL program. Scott Borg, who heads the Antarctic Sciences Section "It is an absolutely astonishing discovery – and just how the sea anemones create and maintain burrows in the bottom of the ice shelf, while that surface is actively melting, remains an intriguing mystery," he said. "This goes to show how much more we have to learn about the Antarctic and how life there has adapted." The discovery was "total serendipity," said Frank Rack Scientists had lowered the robot – a 4.5-foot cylinder equipped with two cameras, a side-mounted lateral camera and a forward-looking camera with a fish-eye lens – into a hole bored through the 270-meter-thick shelf of ice that extends about 1,000 kilometers northward from the grounding zone of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet into the Ross Sea. Their research mission, funded by NSF with support from the New Zealand Foundation for Research, was to learn more about the ocean currents beneath the ice shelf to provide environmental data for modeling the behavior of the ANDRILL drill string, a length of pipe extending through the water column and into the sea floor through which drilling fluids are circulated and core samples are retrieved. [See previous article — On the ice edge: ANDRILL gathers data to drill through moving ice shelf into ancient seafloor sediments.] They didn't expect to discover any organisms living in the ice, and surely not an entirely new species. For more on the story, see the NSF press release |