Researchers find creatures far below Antarctic ice

WASHINGTON – In a surprising discovery about where higher life can thrive, scientists for the first time found a shrimplike creature and a jellyfish beneath a massive Antarctic ice sheet.

Six hundred feet below the ice, where no light shines, scientists had figured little more than a few microbes could exist.

That’s why a NASA team was surprised when they lowered a video camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of an ice sheet in Antarctica. A curious shrimplike creature came swimming by and then parked itself on the camera’s cable. Scientists also pulled up a tentacle they believe came from a foot-long jellyfish.

“We were operating on the presumption that nothing’s there,” said NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will be presenting the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical Union meeting Wednesday.

“We were just gaga over it,” he said of the 3-inch-long, orange critter starring in their two-minute video. Technically, it’s not a shrimp. It’s a Lyssianasid amphipod, which is distantly related to shrimp.

The video is likely to inspire experts to rethink what they know about life in harsh environments. And it has scientists musing that if shrimplike creatures can frolic below 600 feet of Antarctic ice in subfreezing dark water, what about other hostile places? What about Europa, a frozen moon of Jupiter?

“They are looking at the equivalent of a drop of water in a swimming pool that you would expect nothing to be living in and they found not one animal but two,” said biologist Stacy Kim of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, who joined the NASA team later. “We have no idea what’s going on down there.”

Microbiologist Cynan Ellis-Evans of the British Antarctic Survey called the finding intriguing. “This is a first for the sub-glacial environment with that level of sophistication,” he said.

Ellis-Evans said it’s possible the creatures swam in from far away and don’t live there permanently.

But Kim, a co-author of the study, doubts it. The site in West Antarctica is at least 12 miles from open seas. Bindschadler drilled an 8-inch-wide hole and was looking at a tiny amount of water. That means it’s unlikely the two critters swam great distances and were captured randomly in that small of an area, she said.