What's Hiding in Antarctic Ice? Giant Lakes, Ancient Mountains, Prehistoric Creatures & More!

Yahoo

15-05-2025

Antarctica is famous for its frigid temperatures, desolate landscape, penguins, and the predators who eat them. That's what it looks like from the surface, but there are hidden organisms and environments tucked inside and underneath the Antarctic ice.
There is rocky land on the Antarctic continent, but it's covered by a thick layer of ice. The distance between the ground and the surface is an average 1.3 miles, but it gets considerably thicker in some places. And nearly the whole of the continent has been covered over like this for more than 30 million years.
From above, the continent looks like a vast, nearly featureless waste of white but, like the researchers of The Thing learned the hard way, it's hiding a much more complex environment below.
In early 2025, an international team of scientists aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute's R/V Falcor (too) had to make a quick pivot in their research plans when an iceberg the size of Chicago broke loose from the George VI ice shelf.
All at once, researchers had access to a whole new piece of exposed seafloor. Exploring this never-before-seen part of the planet revealed large corals, sponges, octopuses, giant sea spiders, bizarre ice fish with clear blood, and a whole lot more. Just a few years ago, scientists found an estimated 60 million ice fish nesting beneath the Antarctic ice. Odds are these sorts of communities are common beneath the ice.
'We didn't expect to find such a beautiful, thriving ecosystem. Based on the size of the animals, the communities we observed have been there for decades, maybe even hundreds of years," said Dr. Patricia Esquete from the University of Aveiro, Portugal, in a statement.
As the ice sheet moves across the Antarctic continent, it grinds across the rocky ground below, but every so often it gets a break, courtesy of sub-glacial lakes and rivers. Using satellite data, scientists have identified hundreds of lakes and rivers beneath the ice, some of which seemingly defy our expectations.
In ordinary environments, water always flows downhill, following the pull of gravity. But in some parts of Antarctica, the immense pressure of surface ice forces rivers to flow uphill, moving from one sub-glacial lake to the next. Not only are these subsurface waterways exciting places for scientists to study, but they might also help biologists understand how alien life might exist on places like Europa, where liquid water covered by ice is the norm.
There are more than 400 subglacial lakes in Antarctica, and scientists have confirmed the existence of microbial life in some of them. With no access to sunlight or the surface, microbes have to survive on whatever nutrients they can find in the sub-glacial water.
At the boundary between rock and ice, scientists have discovered erosion pulverizing rock. As that happens, nutrients and minerals are released into the water. Those nutrients support methanotrophs which use methane to create energy, methanogens which create energy by converting hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methane, bacteria which convert ammonium into nitrite and nitrate, and more. If there's a useful chemical in the sub-glacial waters, scientists have uncovered a microbe which uses it.
In addition to low-lying valleys, covered lakes, and bizarre sub-glacial rivers, the Antarctic ice is also hiding massive mountain ranges. The Gamburtsev Mountains are roughly equivalent in scale to the European Alps, stretching for approximately 750 miles.
A study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters reveals the range formed about half a billion years ago during the formation of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, when two continental plates smashed together. Since then, they've been relatively stable and they remain there today, buried in the ice.
Today, any animal living on the Antarctic continent or in its coastal waters must be specially evolved to survive the harsh conditions of the planet's South Pole. Ice fish, for instance, have evolved clear blood lacking hemoglobin in order to survive in the frigid polar ocean. In the deep past, things were different.
When Antarctica was part of Gondwana, it was positioned closer to Australia, further from the South Pole, and rotated about 90 degrees. The continent supported lush plant life and a robust ecosystem filled with dinosaurs, ancient marsupial mammals, marine reptiles, and a wide variety of plant life.
Researchers have discovered fossil remains of wood, pollen, fungal spores, leaves, and mosses alongside ankylosaurs (armored dinosaurs), mosasaurs, and plesiosaurs (both marine reptiles). From more recent parts of the fossil record, scientists have uncovered ancient whales and dolphins, dating to about 4.5 million years ago.
These days, Antarctica is a frozen desert, the only place on the planet too extreme for us to set down roots. But there's plenty to see and plenty to learn about the rest of the planet if you're willing to look deeper.
John Carpenter's 1982 frozen thriller, from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.