One of the least-explored places on Earth lies just off the coast of Antarctica. Some 1.5 million square kilometers (580,000 square miles) of ocean there — a vast area the size of Alaska — sits in perpetual darkness. It hides beneath 200 to 600 meters (650 to 2,000 feet) of floating ice. That makes it virtually inaccessible to humans.
Still, in January 2020, a team of researchers made a rare attempt to explore it. They camped on the floating Thwaites Ice Shelf. There, they melted a narrow hole 600 meters (2,000 feet) through the ice. Then they lowered a long, skinny, remote-controlled submarine — called Icefin — to probe the dark waters below.
And it turned up a startling discovery.
As Britney Schmidt watched, the sub’s camera displayed glistening stars. They dangled like Christmas tree ornaments from the icy ceiling above. Dozens of these sparkling stars waved their arms like flower petals.
Schmidt, at the time, was sitting inside a tent atop the ice. Staring at a computer screen, she watched live video being relayed up from the sub as it skimmed just below the ice. The ceiling’s smooth surface gleamed like a mirror in Icefin’s floodlights.
They showcased animals dangling from that ice. But as the sub approached, the critters withdrew, one by one, into small holes in the ice.
Called anemones, these tentacled creatures normally live on the seafloor. Like flowers, they sprout from rocks or sit rooted in sand. But not here. These critters instead had burrowed into the ice, forming what looked like an upside-down aquatic garden.
Shrimp-like crustaceans flitted around them, like bumblebees in a meadow. A fish rested upside down on the ice ceiling, like a cat laying in the grass.
“It was amazing,” says Schmidt, who works at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. A glaciologist, she has devoted much of her career to exploring under the ice. What she witnessed here looked otherworldly, she recalls — like…
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