Image: Woods Hole
If austerity had an opposite it might be fecundity. And yet underneath all of that ice, one of the least accessible locales on Earth, is life: translucent worms and balls of slime thriving underneath a sky of bulbous ice-clouds. It's creepy and quite cool.The video comes courtesy of Woods Hole Ocean Oceanographic Institution and the undersea vehicle known as Nereid Under Ice. The craft's first test results were presented at this month's meeting of the American Geophysical Union. "It was the first time we could document such an abundance of life under the ice," Antje Boetius, a marine biologist and the chief scientist behind the expedition, told Nature.com.The team hopes to use the craft in future explorations beneath ice shelves and glaciers, including those in Antarctica receding due to climate change. Earlier this year, its predecessor, the Nereus, abruptly lost contact with the surface, bubbling up shortly thereafter as an assortment of hull fragments and detritus. It's thought that intense undersea pressures initiated an implosive chain reaction that led to the total loss.Under the Arctic ice life makes its own way. There's little light or oxygen, and nutrients are in very short supply. Energy comes from chomping (or whatever chomping is for a gelatinous worm) on methane and other hydrocarbons stored in undersea coal beds. It's a landscape that offers some hope for life, however limited, on other planets.