Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
By Seth Borenstein
In a surprising discovery about where higher life can thrive, scientists for the first time found a shrimp-like creature and a jellyfish frolicking beneath a massive Antarctic ice sheet.
Six hundred feet below the ice where no light shines, scientists had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could exist.
That’s why a NASA team was surprised when they lowered a video camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of an ice sheet in Antarctica. A curious shrimp-like creature came swimming by and then parked itself on the camera’s cable. Scientists also pulled up a tentacle they believe came from a foot-long jellyfish.
“We were operating on the presumption that nothing’s there,” said NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will be presenting the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical Union meeting Wednesday. “It was a shrimp you’d enjoy having on your plate.”
“We were just gaga over it,” he said of the 3-inch-long, orange critter starring in their two-minute video. Technically, it’s not a shrimp. It’s a Lyssianasid amphipod, which is distantly related to shrimp.
The video is likely to inspire experts to rethink what they know about life in harsh environments. And it has scientists musing that if shrimp-like creatures can frolic below 600 feet of Antarctic ice in subfreezing dark water, what about other hostile places? What about Europa, a frozen moon of Jupiter?
“They are looking at the equivalent of a drop of water in a swimming pool that you would expect nothing to be living in and they found not one animal but two,” said biologist Stacy Kim of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, who joined the NASA team later. “We have no idea what’s going on down there.”
Microbiologist Cynan Ellis-Evans of the British Antarctic Survey called the finding intriguing.
“This is a first for the sub-glacial environment with that level of sophistication,” Ellis-Evans said. He said there have been findings somewhat similar, showing complex life in retreating ice shelves, but nothing quite directly under the ice like this.
Ellis-Evans said it’s possible the creatures swam in from far away and don’t live there permanently.
But Kim, who is a co-author of the study, doubts it. The site in West Antarctica is at least 12 miles from open seas. Bindschadler drilled an 8-inch-wide hole and was looking at a tiny amount of water. That means it’s unlikely that that two critters swam from great distances and were captured randomly in that small of an area, she said.
Yet scientists were puzzled at what the food source would be for these critters. While some microbes can make their own food out of chemicals in the ocean, complex life like the amphipod can’t, Kim said.
So how do they survive? That’s the key question, Kim said.
“It’s pretty amazing when you find a huge puzzle like that on a planet where we thought we know everything,” Kim said.
Labels: Antarctica Research, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, NASA, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
NASA Finds Shrimp-Like Creature, Jellyfish Beneath Antarctic Ice Sheet: ‘We Were Just Gaga Over It’
Friday, August 22, 2008
The Petermann glacier is breaking up. An 11 square mile area of the glacier in northern Greenland broke away after July 10th and before
July 24th. The Petermann Glacier is one of Greenland’s largest glaciers.
Petermann has a floating section 10 miles wide and 50 miles long. At 500 square miles it is the longest floating glacier in the Northern Hemisphere.
A 33.5 square mile of the Petermann broke away 2000-2001, but the Byrd Polar Research Center is predicting continued disintegration and more imminent breakup in the coming year.
An already large crack is widening even more while it moves toward the calving front of the glacier. The loss could be as much as an addition 60 square miles of the Massive ice tongue or 1/3rd. “The crack is advancing to a point where a massive breakup seems imminent, in which case, the area of break-up would be 60 square miles.
Greenland’s fastest moving glacier, Jakobshavn is suddenly speeding up and has nearly doubled its ice flow from land into the ocean. Its flow has contributed to roughly 4% of the sea level increase of the 20th century.
When every dim-wit at the coffee shop argues that is glass never over-flows when the ice melts in his drink, you can remind him this ice is moving from land into the sea. His glass would overflow if he added ice to it from his refrigerator.
Researchers have found the glacier’s speeding up is also coinciding with the very rapid thinning of the ice. It’s loosing as much a 49 feet of thickness per year since 1997.
The glaciers ice-tongue, which began to break apart in 2000, had a restraining effect on the ice behind it. As it thins and breaks it opens a path for even yet more ice to pile into the ocean.
Waleed Abdalati, a senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center says, “…We think there is a dynamic effect in which the glaciers are accelerating due to warming.” They believe the thinning of ice is too much to be attributed to melting alone.
Photo Thanks: Waleed Abdalati, GSFC
NASA MODIS
Byrd Polar Research Center
Labels: Glacier, Greenland, Jakobshavn, NASA, Petermann, Sea level
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Sea level rise already increasing as glaciers melt faster than
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
No one in the U.S. need worry that the Large Hadron Collider will create a black hole and suck them into oblivion.
The black hole is alive and well. It lives in Washington D.C.
CNN reporting NASA’s inspector general office says the marginalized, (lies) they dished out and the mischaracterized (lies) they dished up were due to “inappropriate political interference”. (censorship)
When they start burning books at the library, you can be sure they’ll be calling it a “neighborhood watch” meatless BBQ and the public will eat it up. The smoke won’t be getting in anyone’s eyes due to the egg that is dried up on their faces.
Labels: Censorship US Government, Hadron Collider, NASA, Speak no Evil, U.S. Government
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
NASA Sucked Into Giant Black Hole!
Thursday, March 20, 2008
On March 18 NASA released a report on Arctic Sea Ice. Global Warming Nay-Sayers are spinning some facts in the report to shore up their argument that Global Warming a vast left wing conspiracy while most mainstream media have made little mention of the report.
At the heart of the study is the perennial sea ice. Perennial sea ice is “old ice”. In fact Walt Meier, National Snow and Ice Data Center calls the oldest ice “tough as nails”. Perennial ice is ice that is more than a year old.
While this March NASA’s Aqua satellite, NOAA and U.S. Defense Department satellites showed a slight increase of 3.9 percent over the previous 3 years it is still below the long-term average by 2.2 percent. The increase in the ice occurred due to surface temperatures that were colder than the historical averages.
Most troubling was the area of perennial ice has decreased to an all-time minimum.
On the heels of the ‘new ice’ comes the summer melt season. The new ice is much thinner. The thick and hardy perennial ice used to cover 50-60% of the Arctic, this year it covers less than 30%.
The ‘tough as nails’ very old ice that remains in the Arctic for at least 6 years made up 20% of the Arctic area in the mid to late 80’s. This winter the tough stuff had decreased to just a tiny 6%.
According to NASA Polar ice reflects light from the sun. As this ice begins to melt, less sunlight gets reflected back into space. The sun is instead absorbed into the oceans and land raising the overall temperature and fueling further melting. This results in a positive feedback loop called ice albedo feedback. The more the ice disappears, the more likely it is to continue to disappear.
Photo Thanks: NASA
In September 2007, the Northwest Passage was ice-free for the first time since satellite records began.
It will be interesting to see the comparison of this image with the September 2008 when it is taken.
Labels: Arctic, Global Warming, NASA, Northwest Passage, Polar Ice
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
NASA Report: Arctic still on "thin ice".
Monday, October 22, 2007
After 4 years, $8.5 Million and 24,000 interviews with commercial and general aviation pilots NASA deems findings would undermine the public’s confidence in commercial air travel. Yikes!
NASA shut down this project a year ago and refused to divulge the results. Obviously an already cash-strapped NASA felt there were good reasons to spend $8.5 Million on an aviation safety study. NASA has been auctioning off their own artifacts. One example includes a multi-million dollar satellite from the 1960’s a collector was lucky enough to snag for $50 which now sits in his barn!
Much more troubling than refusing to divulge the results of the lengthy and expensive survey is that last week NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers.
Ya Think?
Thomas S. Luedtke, a senior NASA official acknowledged that the findings of this study could damage the public’s confidence in the airlines adversely affecting airline profits.
For 14 months the Associated Press has tried to obtain the survey data under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. In the end, Luedtke issued a final statement which justified the cover-up. Pilots that participated in the survey might in the end lose their lively hood if the public lost faith in the safety of aviation. The pilots participated in the survey with the promise of anonymity along with the companies for whom they worked.
Don’t ask, don’t tell.
Somebody did ask. The U.S. tax payers have spent $8.5 million on this survey. For NASA not to tell what they learned, in order to protect the profits of the airline industry, is reprehensible.
What is that nasty smell?
Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., Congress chairman House Science and Technology investigations and oversight subcommittee said “There is a faint odor about it all”.
A faint odor isn’t exactly what a red herring gives off.
Officials at NASA Ames Research Center in California have said they want publish their own report on the project. I hope they saved the data they ultimately ordered to be disposed of, otherwise their report may contain the usual vague recollection spin that permeates the U.S.’s selective memory.
Labels: Aviation Safety, NASA, Speak no Evil, cover-up
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
NASA Orders Cover-up of Commercial Aviation Safety!
