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."

Comments

Re: Why is this a surprise?

[BarbaraHudson]

It is a surprise. Think of it - the environment is only 30' in height top to bottom, the bottom is subjected to continuous bombardment by gravel and rocks so nothing can live on the bottom, and anything that is slow (low-energy) gets stoned out of existence, and it's -2C.

No sunlight, sulpher, or thermal vents to add energy to the ecosystem, hundreds of miles from the open sea, and you stick a robe down there and fish swim up to it? There's a reason they said the conditions were the closest you could get to Europa, which has an ice crust over liquid water.

Re:Question

[silentcoder]

Looking at the history of the planet, what we have is basically lots and lots of mass extinctions - every major branch of life reaching it's peak and then being almost entirely eradicated and life basically starting over (and by the way - this happening to the human race is not just likely but an absolute certainty - the only actual defence is off-planet colonies which we don't yet have).

There are different ways you can interpret this data however. One interpretation is that life is extremely rare, that we came so close to it ending forever so many times that we must assume the odds of us being here were billions to one and that it may well never have happened anywhere else - that even if life had gotten started elsewhere, it probably didn't survive into present day.

The other, equally valid, interpretation of the same data is that life is extremely resilient - that it has survived absolutely everything the universe has (quite literally) thrown at it. Species and even entire families aren't resilient but life is - even if something kills absolutely everything except a few extremophile bacteria at the bottom of some volcano somewhere -that's enough, life will re-arise and some day, something as intelligent as us will walk the earth again. By this view it's quite likely we are NOT the first, though we're probably the first to make it space. Biologists like Jack Cohen will tell you that the odds of there being a single shred of evidence we ever existed in a billion years time is as close to zero as makes no difference. Even our roads and buildings aren't as long-lasting as we imagine, they only look that way on human time-scales, not on planetary ones. The satelites will all eventually crash with nothing to replenish lost velocity. That little plaque on the moon may survive- but who knows if it will be found by whatever is next able to ask "why are we here".

There is no real way to choose between these views, they are both equally well supported by the available data and until our capacity to look is significantly improved we can't get data from enough other places to see which prediction they match. For the moment we have two predictions from the same data but until we can confirm either one we can't know.
That is why looking is important. It's also why things like THESE are important, they add data which can let us refine our predictions.

That is a critical part of the scientific process, it's helps us figure out what to be looking for in the first place. The more extreme conditions we find life in - the wider the potential search space becomes (and theoretically - the more likely we are to find *something*). It also means that searching it all takes longer.

There is no scientific answer to the question of whether life is such an unlikely event it only ever happened here, or common and happened many, many times. The data we have can equally well defend either conclusion.
So we need more data. Every bit of new data helps.