Robot Reveals Sea Life Thriving Beneath Antarctic Ice
Two researchers stand next to Icefin before it goes on its underwater mission in Antarctica.
Jacob Buffo
Extreme Engineering in Antarctica: Photos
View Caption + #1: Extreme Engineering in Antarctica
Jan. 15, 2012-- Engineers with British Antarctic Survey have now made it possible to go where no human has gone before: a mile down through solid ice to a buried lake that could harbor life forms never seen before and promises to reveal vital clues to past climate change. SCIENCE CHANNEL VIDEO: Ice King Enduring whipping winds and temperatures of minus 35 degrees Celsius (not counting the wind chill), the engineers used powerful tractor-trains to transport nearly 70 metric tons of drilling equipment across Antarctica's ice, over deep snow and steep mountain passes, to one of the most remote and hostile locations on the planet. The target of this grueling journey: a spot on the ice high above Lake Ellsworth, a mysterious and untouched pocket of liquid water deep inside the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Now that the equipment is in place, a research team will return to in November to drill a three-kilometer borehole into Lake Ellsworth to collect water and sediment. If they succeed, Ellsworth will become the first of Antarctica's 387 known subglacial lakes to be measured and sampled directly. NEWS: Antarctic Drilling Plan Raises Concerns
Credit: British Antarctic Survey
View Caption + #2: BOTTOMS UP
A cargo plane carried the tractors and drilling equipment for the Lake Ellsworth mission as far as Union Glacier, a site in the Ellsworth Mountains that serves as the major hub for all scientific operations to Antarctica's remote interior. ANALYSIS: Antarctica: A 'Scary' Source for Rising Seas
Credit: British Antarctic Survey
View Caption + #3: TRACTOR TRAIN
To get the equipment from Union Glacier to the Lake Ellsworth drilling site, the engineers hitched powerful tractors to sledges and skis to haul the heavy blue containers containing the drilling equipment.
Credit: British Antarctic Survey
View Caption + #4: CHUGGING ALONG
Soft, deep snow and concrete-hard sastrugi snow forms slowed progress, but the tractor-train reached the Lake Ellsworth drilling site in three days.
Credit: British Antarctic Survey
View Caption + #5: MARKING THE SITE
Upon arrival, an engineer fits GPS locators at the corners of the equipment storage. Windblown snow will partially bury the equipment over the coming Antarctic winter, making it otherwise difficult to find when the science team returns in November to start drilling. (Antarctic summers are too short to transport the equipment and accomplish the drilling in a single season.) In the coming months, this precious cargo will endure wind chills reaching minus almost a hundred degrees below zero and wind gusts over 100 miles per hour.
Credit: British Antarctic Survey
View Caption + #6: SPOUTING OFF
Spectacular explosions of snow, like this one detonated at the Lake Ellsworth drilling site during a previous visit, helped scientists decipher the shape of the buried lake. Researchers set off the explosions and then use seismic equipment to record the sound waves reflecting off rock, ice, water and other materials within the ice.
Credit: British Antarctic Survey
View Caption + #7: LOW POINT
Seismic studies have revealed that Lake Ellsworth is a long, narrow U-shaped lake approximately 7.5 miles by about a mile wide. It is nearly 500 feet deep at its deepest point. Ellsworth and other subglacial lakes in Antarctica can remain unfrozen because the ice on top provides insulation for the heat rising up through the bedrock from the earth’s core, melting ice near the base of the ice sheet. This melted water flows into hollows and valleys beneath the ice just as it does on the land surface to form lakes. The largest and most well-known subglacial lake is Lake Vostok on East Antarctica, which Russian scientists have been trying to access, so far unsuccessfully. PHOTOS: New Antarctic Vent Community Found
Credit: British Antarctic Survey
View Caption + #8: EASIER GOING
Small planes can land safely at the Lake Ellsworth drilling site during the summer months. Getting people and basic supplies to the site in November will not take the extreme effort of delivering the drilling equipment. But that doesn't mean the work will be easy. The team will live in tents and work on location for about six weeks.
Credit: British Antarctic Survey
View Caption + #9: GETTING TO THE LAKE
Researchers will use a stream of high-pressure hot water blasted from the end of this high-tech yellow hose to drill through the frozen ice sheet lying above the Lake Ellsworth. The hose is long enough to extend from the surface down into the buried lake and strong enough to support its own weight, as well as that of the drill nozzle. Other equipment delivered by tractor-train included: (1) an industrial-sized boiler to heat 30,000 liters of hot water to nearly 100 degrees for the drill (2) three large surface tanks (each with a 16-foot diameter) to store water above freezing point in temperatures as low as minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit and (3) several large-scale generators to provide electrical power to the drill. Through a borehole carved using hot-water drill, the team will lower a titanium probe to measure and sample the water, followed by a corer to extract sediment from the lake. They will have just 60 hours to collect water and sediment samples before the borehole re-freezes. The hot water drill will use and recycle the existing ice on site for the drilling fluid, minimizing the potential for contamination of the lake. All equipment was designed and manufactured to meet space-industry standards for "clean" technology.
Credit: British Antarctic Survey
View Caption + #10: PRISTINE PROMISE
Soon the sun will set for the last time over the Lake Ellsworth drilling site, bringing several long weeks of darkness. The engineers and scientists will return with the light, ready to make history. The waters of Lake Ellsworth have been cut of from all light for as long as half a million years. Also under high pressure all that time, the hidden lake may have evolved unusual forms of microbial life. If such microbes turn out to exist, they could help explain how life managed to survive during global deep freezes of the Earth's distant past -- during the so-called Snowball Earth episodes, when most if not all of the planet was enshrouded in ice. And they might up the odds that life could have evolved in other extreme environments, such as the liquid water known to exist beneath the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. Now we just have to wait and see. READ MORE ARTICLES BY SARAH SIMPSON
Credit: British Antarctic Survey
Related Links
The water beneath Antarctica's thick ice may be dark and chilly, but it still harbors a surprising amount of sea life, including sea stars, sponges and anemones, according to a new underwater robotic expedition.
Researchers captured the aquatic footage at Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelfwith a new remotely operated vehicle (ROV), dubbed Icefin. The ROV is capable of diving 0.9 miles (1.5 kilometers) below sea level and conducting 1.9-mile-long (3 km) surveys, they said.
Antarctica is a cold, harsh place with vast changing landscapes and uncovered mysteries underneath the ice.
DCI
First, the researchers had to cut a 12-inch hole through about 66 feet (20 m) of ice. Then, they dropped Icefin through the hole, and directed it to dive down another 1,640 feet (500 m) to the seafloor, they said. [ 50 Amazing Facts About Antarctica]
Earlier underwater vehicles in Icefin's class could dive only a few hundred meters, a limiting factor given that the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarcticacan be up to 3.1 miles (5 km) deep.
"What truly separates Icefin from some of the other vehicles is that it's fairly slender, yet still has all of the sensors that the scientists … need," Mick West, the robot's principal research engineer and a senior research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, said in a statement. "Our vehicle has instrumentation aboard both for navigation and ocean science that other vehicles do not."
For instance, since GPS doesn't work under Antarctica's thick ice, Icefin uses a navigation system known as SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). SLAM allows the robot to triangulateits position based on its range and the features around it, such as those on the seafloor below it or the ice above it.
"Using algorithms such as SLAM allows us to construct a map of the unknown under-ice environment," West said. "When you can do that, you can begin to get a 3D picture of what's going on under the water."
In spite of Antarctica's harsh environment, Icefin's videos showed an active community of organisms thriving on the seafloor. Such footage may help scientists learn how animals survive in extreme locations, and understand how Antarctica's ice shelves are changing amidst warming conditions, the researchers said.
"We saw evidence of a complex community on the seafloor that has never been observed before, and unprecedented detail on the ice-ocean interface that hasn't been achieved before," said Britney Schmidt, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech and the principle investigator of the Icefin project.
Icefin may even help scientists search for life on other planets. For instance, Jupiter's moon Europa has ice-capped oceans that are remarkably similar to Antarctica's ice-covered waters, the researchers said.
"We're advancing hypotheses that we need for Europa, and understanding ocean systems here better," Schmidt said. "We're also developing and getting comfortable with technologies that make polar science, and eventually Europa science, more realistic."
The team finished its Antarctic research in December 2014. Icefin is slated to explore the Arctic in the summer of 2016 and return to Antarctica that fall, the researchers said.
More From LiveScience:
Original article on Live Science.
Copyright 2015 LiveScience , a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
0 Response to "Robot Reveals Sea Life Thriving Beneath Antarctic Ice"
Post a Comment