Jyotika Virmani
Appearances
The Excerpt
Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
a while for such a large iceberg to break away but this one started to move quite quickly and they realized that this was an amazing opportunity a once in a lifetime opportunity because they were only a day or two away from that location And normally it takes scientists months, if not longer, to get to a location where a piece of the ice has broken away.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
So it was a really fast decision, but it was really serendipitous and we really all needed to do that.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
I think the most surprising find was that there was so much life under this location. So imagine this is an iceberg that's 150 meters thick and it's been there for decades, if not centuries, and it's dark down there and sunlight doesn't get down there. So where is this life coming from? Where is it getting its nutrients?
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
So the fact that there was so much life and not just one type of life, but a variety of life, sponges and corals and sea spiders and just a whole range of life shows that it was a really mature ecosystem. And it's been there obviously for a long time. So that was the biggest surprise, I think.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
Some of the species we know about already and we see them in other parts of the ocean, but there are definitely new species and it will take a little while to identify
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
what they are exactly but there are so many yet unknowns about the ocean not just about what lives there but also the sea floor itself and what the shape of the sea floor is if you like all of this contributes to that knowledge that we will help us to better understand the ocean
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
We know how deep some of this life form is because we have on board our research vessel a very sophisticated underwater robot called ROV Sebastian, which we can put down to about 4,500 meters depth. So in this case, we took it down and we found life as deep as 1,300 meters below the sea surface, which is amazing.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
How these creatures have thrived is one of the active regions of research now because it's not had direct sunlight and normally the nutrients come from the surface and they fall down through the ocean to these vast depths. So life thriving at over a thousand meters depth is part of the question of where are these nutrients coming from?
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
One possible theory is that they are being brought through by ocean currents that are flowing underneath the ice shelf.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
So the beauty of this piece of discovery of getting to this location so quickly after the ice broke off is we now have a baseline of information of what it was like there with the ice above it. And so this now sets a bar for future studies. And so scientists can come back next year or the year after and see how that ecosystem has evolved.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
evolved without the ice above it and so that will then lend an understanding to what does the world look like if there wasn't ice in covering some of these parts of the world.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
That's a very interesting question. Can they move? Some of them can move. Some of them though are embedded in that seabed. So they're anchored in place and they of course will not be able to move. That again, until we go back or until scientists go back in a few months or a year, it's really difficult to say how this ecosystem is going to evolve.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
But the fact that we have this baseline information is phenomenal.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
Bushmeat Ocean Institute operates the research vessel Falcon 2. It's a state-of-the-art, sophisticated research vessel. It's 110 meters in length. And it's built for science, and it's got eight science labs on board. It's got a whole suite of sensors, over 30 ocean and atmospheric sensors on board. And it has an ROV, which is a remotely operated vehicle, which is tethered to the vessel.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
which can collect samples as well as 4K video imagery, which we then transmit in real time to the world. And so anyone can join the Schmidt Ocean Institute on our YouTube channel and explore the ocean in real time just at the same time that the scientists are doing and make these discoveries at the same time. So it's like exploring a new world, even though it's only a few kilometers away.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
About just over 26% of the sea floor has currently been mapped, which is quite surprising because the ocean covers 71% of our planet. So really we've not even mapped half of the planet Earth's surface. And so we are part of an international program where everyone is contributing the data that they map to this program called Seabird 2030 so that we can get a complete map of the seafloor.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
And we have on board FALCOR2, our research vessel, for sophisticated mapping technologies that can map down to the full ocean depth.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
The Antarctic is, of course, a very difficult, very harsh environment to operate in and so it has a field season. which is only a few months, maybe from November, if we're lucky, to March. So the field season this year for Antarctic researchers and for ships to go down there has essentially pretty much ended because the ice has expanded again. So now the next opportunity that scientists
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
Thank you very much for inviting me, Dana.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
will have to go back to this region to continue looking at how the ecosystem has evolved will be most likely late at the end of 2025 would be the earliest for any research vessel really to get down there.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
I think as parts of the ocean do get uncovered around Antarctica, we will find new species. And in fact, wherever we sail, even away from Antarctica, even in the tropics, we always find new species because there is still so much yet to be learned about the ocean. The ocean, it is about 97% of the living space, the deep sea of the living space on our planet.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
And we've only barely scratched that surface in terms of seeing what's down there.
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Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
Thank you so much for inviting me, Dana.
The Excerpt
Research team discovers new life flourishing under an ice shelf
So this was the first time that Schmidt Ocean Institute has been down to Antarctica as part of our first Antarctic field season. And so the team that was on board was, of course, monitoring the ice movements and on a regular basis from satellite imagery. And they saw the crack of this big, big iceberg from the George VI ice shelf. And of course, they were monitoring it. And normally it takes...