Something's living beneath the Antarctic ice...

Anyone who’s seen the cult sci-fi horror The Thing knows very well that the Antarctic ice sheet is full of shape-shifting aliens just waiting to be defrosted so they can go on a rampage.

Well, thankfully we haven’t found one of those yet. But we have found tiny microbes living a mile-and-a-half under the ice’s surface – the first solid proof of life on the Antarctic continent.

“We were able to prove unequivocally to the world that Antarctica is not a dead continent,” said Professor John Priscu, from Montana State University. And this is a big deal in the science world.