WASHINGTON — In a surprising discovery about where higher life can thrive, scientists for the first time found a shrimp-like creature and a jellyfish frolicking beneath a massive Antarctic ice sheet.
Six hundred feet below the ice where no light shines, scientists had figured nothing much 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 shrimp-like 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. "It was a shrimp you'd enjoy having on your plate."
"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 shrimp-like 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."
WASHINGTON — Methane is leaking into the atmosphere from unstable permafrost in the Arctic Ocean faster than scientists had thought and could worsen global warming, a study said Thursday.
From 2003 to 2008, an international research team led by University of Alaska-Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov surveyed the waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which covers more than 772,200 square miles (two million square kilometers) of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean.
"This discovery reveals a large but overlooked source of methane gas escaping from permafrost underwater, rather than on land," the study said.
"More widespread emissions could have dramatic effects on global warming in the future."
Earlier studies in Siberia had focused on methane escaping from thawing permafrost on land.
Scientists have long thought that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf acted as an impermeable barrier that sealed in methane, a powerful greenhouse gas 30 times more potent that carbon dioxide.
But the research team's observations showed that the permafrost submerged on the shelf is perforated and leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere.
More than 80 percent of the deep water and more than half of surface water had methane levels around eight times higher than found in normal seawater, according to the study published in the journal Science.
The researchers warned that the release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.
"Ocean-bottom permafrost contains vast amounts of carbon, and experts are concerned that its release as methane gas would lead to warmer atmospheric temperatures, thus creating a positive-feedback loop that would lead to more methane escaping from the permafrost and more global warming," they said.
GEORGETOWN, Guyana — A 22-year-old American rower completed a solo journey across the Atlantic Ocean on Sunday, touching a pier in the coffee-brown waters of Guyana to claim a record as the youngest person to accomplish the feat.
Katie Spotz, who spent more than two months alone at sea, hugged her father and brother as 200 people cheered her arrival in this South American capital.
"The hardest part was just the solo part," Spotz said, saying she struggled with boredom and had trouble sleeping inside the cramped, 19-foot (6-meter) row boat.
The athlete from Mentor, Ohio, set out from Dakar, Senegal, on Jan. 3 and endured rough seas during the 2,817-mile (4,533-kilometer) crossing. She traveled without any support boat aside from a Coast Guard vessel that escorted her to Guyana's coast.
She rowed to raise money and awareness for the Blue Planet Run Foundation, a nonprofit whose goal is to bring clean drinking water to the estimated 1 billion people worldwide who lack it.
"The records are just a bonus for Katie. Rowing the Atlantic and raising funds for clean water are the things she really cares about," said her coach Sam Williams...
Some of the most harrowing moments came near the voyage's end. As she approached the continental shelf, waves crashed over the boat and Spotz worried it would capsize. On Saturday, she had to use a fire extinguisher after a piece of tracking equipment caught fire.
Oxygen-breathing bacteria that live on the ocean bottom have a problem. Those sitting atop the sediment have ready access to oxygen in the water but not to the precious mineral nutrients that lie out of reach a centimeter or so below the ground. Meanwhile, those microbes that live in the sediment can access the nutrients, but they lack oxygen. How do both groups survive?
Microbial ecologist Lars Peter Nielsen of Aarhus University in Denmark figured the surface and subsurface bacteria were somehow exchanging oxygen and nutrients with one another. To find out how, he and colleagues scooped up some mud from the bottom of the 20-meter-deep ocean in Aarhus Bay and other waters near the university and plopped it into a beaker in their lab.
Then the researchers did something they knew would make the bacteria unhappy: They started removing the oxygen from the water. If the bacteria were swapping materials, as Nielsen had suspected, those living below the surface of the mud would have gradually noticed that their oxygen supply was being cut off; they would have registered chemical changes in the sediment that could be detected by sensors. But instead, Nielsen and colleagues witnessed something far more rapid. Almost as soon as the researchers began removing the oxygen, the subsurface bacteria stopped consuming hydrogen sulfide in the mud. More important, this metabolic shutdown was a sign that the buried bacteria almost instantly realized something in the environment far above them had changed. The researchers also detected very rapid pH changes in the water in the beaker.
These responses occurred too quickly for any sort of chemical exchange or molecular process such as osmosis, says Nielsen. The most plausible option, his team reports in the 25 February issue of Nature, is that the bacteria are somehow communicating electrically by transmitting electrons back and forth. How exactly they do this is unclear, but Nielsen suspects the organisms may all be connected to each other via a microscopic electric grid, possibly made from tiny grains of metal, such as iron and manganese, in the sediment.
"...the Robinson Crusoe Island, which is an integral part of the Juan Fernandez Archipelago, has already been deluged. It was reported that Chile’s Robinson Crusoe Island has already been smashed by huge waves, after the massive earthquake. Chile’s Robinson Crusoe Island is a very remote island, and it is located around 700 kilometers from the mainland. The Chilean President Michelle Bachelet announced that 2 ships with relief material have already been dispatched to the Robinson Crusoe Island."
In a December, 2007 NYRB piece titled Where Wonders Await Us, Tim Flannery discusses two books -- The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss by Claire Nouvian and The Silent Deep: The Discovery, Ecology and Conservation of the Deep Sea by Tony Koslow -- full of astounding information and mind-blowing photos of the ocean depths. Our ignorance of this vast world is startling. Flannery: "Despite the fact that less than one percent of the ocean deep has been mapped, today our explorations are restricted to depths of six thousand meters or less."
Deep sea exploration is far cheaper and faster than space travel, and it even holds promise for helping us explore the heavens. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute notes that "Ocean research reveals fundamental planetary forces which support thriving communities of life, on and below the seafloor, that hold key clues to the evolution of life on Earth and the possibility of life on other planets."
The death of Dawn Brancheau is tragic -- but not more so than the last 28 years of slow death that Tillikum has experienced and the similar experiences of other highly intelligent creatures.
