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Showing posts from May 29, 2016

Discovery: Fish Live beneath Antarctica

Discovery: Fish Live beneath Antarctica Scientists find translucent fish in a wedge of water hidden under 740 meters of ice, 850 kilometers from sunlight By Douglas Fox on January 21, 2016 Stunned researchers in Antarctica have discovered fish and other aquatic animals living in perpetual darkness and cold, beneath a roof of ice 740 meters thick. The animals inhabit a wedge of seawater only 10 meters deep, sealed between the ice above and a barren, rocky seafloor below—a location so remote and hostile the many scientists expected to find nothing but scant microbial life. A team of ice drillers and scientists made the discovery after lowering a small, custom-built robot down a narrow hole they bored through the Ross Ice Shelf, a slab of glacial ice the size of France that hangs off the coastline of Antarctica and floats on the ocean. The remote water they tapped sits beneath the back corner of the floating shelf, where the shelf meets what would be the sho