Sea life found deep under Antarctica ice by Zuzana Zelenakova

A team of NASA scientists has made a surprising discovery in the Antarctica. Six hundred feet under the ice where is no lights and supposedly shouldn´t be life, they found a swimming shrimp-like creature, they also glimpsed a tentacle of what they believe was a jellyfish. The discovery was made quite by accident when the scientists lowered a small video camera to get a photograph of an ice shelf. The fact that living creatures were found in such conditions could alter the view of what animals can survive in certain extreme environment completely. "We were operating on the presumption that nothing's there," NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler told the Associated Pr! ess. "It was a shrimp you'd enjoy having on your plate." Scientists were naturally extremely excited about the discovery of the creature that is called Lyssianasid amphipod, which could subsequently lead to other expeditions aimed at observing possible signs of life in environments that experts believed till now were unable to support life, that includes not only Earth, but also frozen moons in space. Lyssianasid amphipod is not an actual shrimp, but is related to it and looks similar. "It's pretty amazing when you find a huge puzzle like that on a planet where we thought we know everything," said biologist Stacy Kim of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, who worked with the NASA team. Microbiologist Cynan Ellis-Evans of the British Antarctic Survey expressed doubts about the creatures living in the area permanently. According to him, they might very well swam there from any other place. However, Kim claims that is unlikely given the fact that the West Anta! rctica site where they drilled the hole is distanced about 19 ! kilomete rs from open seas. The findings made by the team under the lead NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler will be presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting on Wednesday.

related story (sgx16786): http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100315/ap_on_sc/us_sci_antarcti...

by Zuzana Zelenakova for Cantell TV (http://cantell.tv)

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