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March 16, 2010 - NASA Finds Shrimp and Jellyfish Tentacles
590 Feet Below Antarctic Ice.
“We were operating on the presumption that nothing's there.
It was a shrimp you'd enjoy having on your plate.
We were just gaga over it.” - Robert Bindschadler, Ph.D.,
NASA Geophysicist and Antarctic Researcher

This December 2009 NASA video frame shows a 3-inch-long shrimp,
Lyssianasid amphipod, from a video camera that a NASA team lowered to view
for the first time the dark, sunless underbelly of Windless Bight in Pine Island Glacier
20 miles northeast of McMurdo Station, West Antarctica, at a site 12 miles
from open seas. Video frame courtesy NASA.

An 8-inch-diameter hole was drilled through the 590-feet-thick (180-meters) Windless Bight, Pine Island Glacier ice shelf in West Antarctica. To the scientists' surprise, a curious shrimp swam by and then attached to the camera cable. The research team also found foot-long tentacles attached to the camera cable, probably from jelly fish. The key questions: how do the creatures survive in a dark, sub-glacial environment? What do they eat? And what could also be living in the deep oceans of Europa, one of Jupiter's ice and water moons? This research will be presented Wednesday, March 18, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. See: AGU.