Researchers Discover Stunning Cavern Half the Size of Manhattan Teeming With Life Beneath the Antarctic Ice

A few days after 2021 Christmas, Craig Stevens was seated on his chair, his eyes glued to a computer monitor of a lab inside Antarctica’s Kamb Ice Stream. Footage of a glacial ice formation was playing on the computer screen. Steven watched with interest as the footage revealed a jagged meltwater hole his team had drilled into the ice. As the camera raked deeper, the narrow meltwater tube unfolded into ethereal undulations, delicate bulges, and slopes that made the surface look like a loaf of bread, a cathedral, or an amphitheater. As the camera reached 500 meters below the ice, Stevens gasped and started jumping up and down with excitement. Deep below the passive blanket of ice lurked a mysterious hidden world of tiny bumblebee-sized organisms, reported The Guardian.

“We were jumping up and down because having all those animals swimming around our equipment means that there’s clearly an important ecosystem there,” Stevens told the news channel. Stevens, who is the physical oceanographer at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Wellington, was part of a multi-disciplinary research partnership involving scientists from GNS Science and Victoria, Otago, and Auckland universities.

These researchers were monitoring Antarctica’s largest body of floating ice, the Ross Ice Shelf, located south of New Zealand. They were tracking the heat, salt, and energetics of the ice shelf using instruments like Argo floats that collect data about water’s warmth by drifting with the ocean currents, and radar units that send pulses of radiation down the ice sheet to gauge its thickness. They passed the data collected from these instruments to passing satellites, from where it got stored as satellite images in their computers.

In New Zealand, Steven’s colleague, Huw Horgan, was studying these satellite images when his eye caught an unusual groove popping out of an ice plain. From previous studies, these scientists already knew that a veneer of liquid water bubbled beneath the crusty ice sheet covering Antarctica. It was believed that the heat seeping from Earth’s fiery molten interior subtly and slowly melts away the innermost layers of ice, slimming its thickness little by little. These water pools sitting beneath the glacial ice spill and flow into the surrounding network of freshwater lakes. But these deep-gurgling pools were never monitored for real.

Two years after Horgan’s discovery, Stevens and his colleagues visited the Antarctic continent, curious to find out what lay beneath the spotted groove. Using a hot water hose, the team melted half a kilometer of ice under the depression. With hot water drills, they drilled down the crevice, carving a meltwater tube with a circumference the size of a dinner plate. Thereupon, they lowered a camera into the tube, to investigate what was going on beneath the icy sheath.

As the camera hurtled deeper into the hole, the walls around it began to widen, unfolding an ethereal limestone-like cavern, nearly tall enough to hold the Empire State Building and half as long as Manhattan, per Science News. Stevens and his team gazed in disbelief as the cavernlike grotto appeared to vibrate. It wasn’t clear liquid water. Something was blurry and hazy. They continued watching as the screen got smeared with zillions of tiny orange creatures darting and wriggling in the watery hollow. At first, they thought there was something wrong with the camera, but after a while, the sight couldn’t be denied. “Seeing them was just complete shock,” Horgan told Science News.

The team’s excitement didn’t end there. They had deployed its moorings a few days before the enormous eruption of the Tongan volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai. When the volcano erupted, and the tsunami traveled through the glacial ice, their instruments detected significant changes in the pressure of the fascinating cavern. “Seeing the effect of the Tongan volcano, which erupted thousands of kilometers away, was quite remarkable,” recalled Stevens in a statement.