Researchers were afforded the opportunity of a lifetime after a massive ice shelf broke off 57 miles from their vessel. Photos: Schmidt Ocean//YouTube
After a chunk of the George VI ice shelf in the Antarctic broke off, scientists were able to do something never done before: explore an unseen ecosystem hundreds of feet below the shelf just hours after it was exposed.
“This is unprecedented, to be able to get there so quickly,” Dr. Jyotika Virmani, the executive director of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, told CBS Saturday Morning.
The team, which was aboard the R/V Falkor (a research vessel I really hope was named after The Neverending Story‘s luck dragon) was 57 miles away from the George VI ice shelf when it broke away from its glacier. According to the team’s lead scientist, Dr. Patricia Esquete, it was a given that they’d change plans to go and have a look.
“We were like ‘Oh my God, I cannot believe this is happening,'” Esquete said. “Everybody agreed that we had to go there.”
Within a few hours, the R/V Falkor was onsite, and a robot was dropped over 3,000 feet down into an area that has never, until now, been within human eyeshot. A camera on the robot livestreamed to the scientists and right away, they were treated to a glut of undiscovered things.
“The first thing we saw was a huge sponge with a crab on it,” Esquete said. “That’s already quite amazing, because one question that we had is ‘Will there be any life at all?'”
Since sponges grow almost imperceptibly slowly, a huge sponge meant that the ecosystem the researchers were looking at had been growing for centuries. For the next eight days, the remotely operated vehicle made its way around the seafloor, finding huge corals, ice fish, sea spiders, and more.
It’s thought that the ocean’s currents are responsible for bringing enough nutrients to the area to sustain a thriving ecosystem, and since they began exploring, the team has discovered six new-to-science species.
With the newly available area to study, the researchers already plan on returning in 2028.
“The Antarctic is changing rapidly,” Esquete said. “And in order to understand what (is) going to happen, we really need to come back and keep studying and keep trying to learn and understand what was driving that ecosystem under the ice shelf.”
