Ice shelves’ demise reveals beauty of hidden wildlife
This is the first time explorers have been able to catalogue wildlife where two mammoth ice shelves used to extend over the Weddell Sea.
At least 5,000 years old, the ice shelves collapsed in two stages over the last dozen years. Global warming is seen as the culprit behind the ice shelves’ demise, said Gauthier Chapelle of the Polar Foundation in Brussels.
“These kind of collapses are expected to happen more,” he said.
Melting ice shelves are not expected to directly contribute much to global sea level rise, but glaciologists believe these vast swaths of ice act like dams to slow down glaciers as they move over the Antarctic land mass toward the coast. Without the ice shelves, glaciers may move over the water more quickly, and this would substantially add to rising seas.
Before the collapse, researchers could only peer through holes drilled deep into the ice.
Mr Chapelle and other scientists from 14 nations found fauna usually associated with seabeds about three times that deep, in places where the creatures must adapt to scarcity to survive.
Long-limbed sea stars, some with more than the usual five appendages, mingled with the ice fish, and groups of sea cucumbers were observed moving together, all in one direction.
The explorers also found thick settlements of fast-growing animals called sea squirts which apparently started colonising the area only after the ice shelves collapsed.
