Roughly the size of France, the Ross Ice Shelf is an inhospitable land, if you can even call it that. There, hanging from the edge of Antarctica, the ice sinks a half-mile thick. So thick, in fact, that until late January, no one thought life beyond microbes could exist beneath the ice in frigid waters of perpetual darkness. But then a team of scientists sank a probe down to the sea bottom, where they encountered a “rocky, like a lunar surface.” The probe, unexpectedly, wasn’t alone.
Like a wraith, a translucent fish shimmered into view. No one could believe it. There were dozens of them – and an amphipod, too – swimming and surviving in waters that shouldn’t have been able to support life. Beneath more than 2,400 feet of ice and more than 500 miles from the shelf’s edge, there was life. And no one’s quite sure how.
These creatures are known as an extremophiles, a life form that survives in an extremely hostile environment. It also signals the irony of modern space exploration: The search for extraterrestrial life begins, strangely enough, here. If a fish – a fish! – can survive beneath all the ice, what does that mean for what may lurk beneath the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa? What does that mean for Saturn’s moon Enceladus?
And:
A paper published in Nature made the case that Enceladus could have what it takes to support life. In 2005, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft discovered evidence of geysers that might have emitted plumes of water. But now, according to the paper, scientists have found what NASA called “the first clear evidence” that those plumes could be linked to an active hydrothermal system in the moon “which may resemble that seen in the deep oceans on Earth.”