Slashdot Mirror
Fish Found Living Half a Mile Under Antarctic Ice
BarbaraHudson (3785311) writes "Researchers were startled to find fish, crustaceans and jellyfish investigating a submersible camera after drilling through nearly 2,500 feet (740 meters) of Antarctic ice. The swimmers are in one of the world's most extreme ecosystems, hidden beneath the Ross Ice Shelf, roughly 530 miles (850 kilometers) from the open ocean. "This is the closest we can get to something like Europa," said Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a chief scientist on the drilling project. More pictures here."
Since the site only has scientific value because it has been sealed away for millennia, I'd have thought they'd take more care about preserving its microbial integrity and not just go diving in it.
Considering all the extreme places we've found life on earth, I would actually have expected to find some.
These articles never covers the issues that really matter!
Is the place where they were observing contiguous with the ocean, or is it completely isolated from the ocean?
good luck reeling it in.
It's still open to the ocean. Big news would be Vostok finding fish in a completely sealed-off lake.
Care was taken. All instruments were cleansed with hydrogen peroxide, and then irradiated with a ultravoilet light before/while being lowered down the borehole
"This is the closest we can get to something like Europa," said Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist at the University of California...
So, not very close at all, considering that ocean is attached to all the world's oceans, which enjoy the benefits of most of the solar energy the planet receives impinging on a liquid surface. Europa is a long long way from the Sun, and the inverse square law is a bitch. While Jupiter really wants to grow up and become the brown dwarf it was always meant to be, it didn't. The radiation it puts out is hardly enough to make up the difference between the solar energy received by Earth and by Europa.
Is life in Europa possible? Yes. Liquid water indicates there is at least some energy to be had. Is high energy life possible? We can't categorically say no unless we go and look, but it's improbable.
Deep ice fishing extreeeeemm~!
When are we going to see the interview responses from Robert Ballard (http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/14/11/03/171212/)?
Researcher 1: That's your wife down there!
Researcher 2: What?
Researcher 1: Yep, she's some cold fish your wife... Bazinga!
Can't they just wait until global warming kicks in full force then just bikini dive into the tropical paradise?
Should only be a year or two, I let my diesel idle all the time.
The Ross Ice Shelf has no analog on Europa at all.
The analogy is failed.
Ha.
Every time life is found in extreme condition we start discussing life on extreme planets again, but isn't this overlooking something?
Life is adaptable, true, but it's not necessary common as an event.
Isn't the reason that life is found there that it only evolved to survive there? What evidence is there that life would have appeared at all if the conditions would have been extreme across all Earth?
The way I see it life appeared in warmer and nicer conditions and then just moved closer and closer to the extreme areas. So the chances to find life on Europa are very very slim unless there are some hidden sweet spots (light, high temperatures etc) where it could have appeared so that it can move to the extreme areas after that.
Notice how the anthropogenic global warming conspiracists (that's you) always resort to this kind of language.
Much like any other belief system which lacks scientific evidence (that's your platform), the principal method of proselytization typically involves damning the unbeliever, despite his or her simple insistence on rationality and evidence.
The blatantly obvious agenda behind the "science" is so plainly visible for the world to see now, that the only remaining advocates of AGW, are those who stand to benefit from said agenda and those pathetic sheep (of which most religions are comprised) who believe what they are told. (That's your category).
This is non-news. Now half a mile above the ice, that would be something!
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
Adding to the body of evidence that biology is not a science, simply 'butterfly collecting'. With no first principles, biology simply makes guesses based on what it has found in the past. It has zero capacity to predict the existence of life (even life 'as we know it'), let alone the nature of life.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
is are they tasty?
of introduced microbes? Just mean reaching the same population density takes a few days longer... Granted, this is not Lake Vostok, so difference concerns may apply. And it's true that a smaller amount of bacteria introduced provides more time for the ecosystem to respond to it by eating it before it expands.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.