Breaking All the Rules: The First Recorded Hard Substrate Sessile Benthic Community Far Beneath an Antarctic Ice Shelf
The seafloor beneath floating ice shelves accounts roughly a third of the Antarctic’s 5 million km 2 of continental shelf. Prior to this study, our knowledge of these habitats and the life they support was restricted to what has been observed from eight boreholes drilled for geological and glaciolog...
Published in: | Frontiers in Marine Science |
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2021
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Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.642040 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.642040/full |
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crfrontiers:10.3389/fmars.2021.642040 2024-09-15T17:46:58+00:00 Breaking All the Rules: The First Recorded Hard Substrate Sessile Benthic Community Far Beneath an Antarctic Ice Shelf Griffiths, Huw J. Anker, Paul Linse, Katrin Maxwell, Jamie Post, Alexandra L. Stevens, Craig Tulaczyk, Slawek Smith, James A. 2021 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.642040 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.642040/full unknown Frontiers Media SA https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Frontiers in Marine Science volume 8 ISSN 2296-7745 journal-article 2021 crfrontiers https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.642040 2024-08-20T04:04:37Z The seafloor beneath floating ice shelves accounts roughly a third of the Antarctic’s 5 million km 2 of continental shelf. Prior to this study, our knowledge of these habitats and the life they support was restricted to what has been observed from eight boreholes drilled for geological and glaciological studies. The established theory of sub-ice shelf biogeography is that both functional and taxonomic diversities decrease along a nutrient gradient with distance from the ice shelf front, resulting in a depauperate fauna, dominated by mobile scavengers and predators toward the grounding line. Mobile macro-benthic life and mega-benthic life have been observed as far as 700 km under an ice shelf. New observations from two boreholes in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf challenge the idea that sessile organisms reduce in prevalence the further under the ice you go. The discovery of an established community consisting of only sessile, probably filter feeding, organisms (sponges and other taxa) on a boulder 260 km from the ice front raises significant questions, especially when the local currents suggest that this community is somewhere between 625 km and 1500 km in the direction of water flow from the nearest region of photosynthesis. This new evidence requires us to rethink our ideas with regard to the diversity of community types found under ice shelves, the key factors which control their distribution and their vulnerability to environmental change and ice shelf collapse. Article in Journal/Newspaper Antarc* Antarctic Filchner Ronne Ice Shelf Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf Ice Shelf Ice Shelves Ronne Ice Shelf Frontiers (Publisher) Frontiers in Marine Science 8 |
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The seafloor beneath floating ice shelves accounts roughly a third of the Antarctic’s 5 million km 2 of continental shelf. Prior to this study, our knowledge of these habitats and the life they support was restricted to what has been observed from eight boreholes drilled for geological and glaciological studies. The established theory of sub-ice shelf biogeography is that both functional and taxonomic diversities decrease along a nutrient gradient with distance from the ice shelf front, resulting in a depauperate fauna, dominated by mobile scavengers and predators toward the grounding line. Mobile macro-benthic life and mega-benthic life have been observed as far as 700 km under an ice shelf. New observations from two boreholes in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf challenge the idea that sessile organisms reduce in prevalence the further under the ice you go. The discovery of an established community consisting of only sessile, probably filter feeding, organisms (sponges and other taxa) on a boulder 260 km from the ice front raises significant questions, especially when the local currents suggest that this community is somewhere between 625 km and 1500 km in the direction of water flow from the nearest region of photosynthesis. This new evidence requires us to rethink our ideas with regard to the diversity of community types found under ice shelves, the key factors which control their distribution and their vulnerability to environmental change and ice shelf collapse. |
format |
Article in Journal/Newspaper |
author |
Griffiths, Huw J. Anker, Paul Linse, Katrin Maxwell, Jamie Post, Alexandra L. Stevens, Craig Tulaczyk, Slawek Smith, James A. |
spellingShingle |
Griffiths, Huw J. Anker, Paul Linse, Katrin Maxwell, Jamie Post, Alexandra L. Stevens, Craig Tulaczyk, Slawek Smith, James A. Breaking All the Rules: The First Recorded Hard Substrate Sessile Benthic Community Far Beneath an Antarctic Ice Shelf |
author_facet |
Griffiths, Huw J. Anker, Paul Linse, Katrin Maxwell, Jamie Post, Alexandra L. Stevens, Craig Tulaczyk, Slawek Smith, James A. |
author_sort |
Griffiths, Huw J. |
title |
Breaking All the Rules: The First Recorded Hard Substrate Sessile Benthic Community Far Beneath an Antarctic Ice Shelf |
title_short |
Breaking All the Rules: The First Recorded Hard Substrate Sessile Benthic Community Far Beneath an Antarctic Ice Shelf |
title_full |
Breaking All the Rules: The First Recorded Hard Substrate Sessile Benthic Community Far Beneath an Antarctic Ice Shelf |
title_fullStr |
Breaking All the Rules: The First Recorded Hard Substrate Sessile Benthic Community Far Beneath an Antarctic Ice Shelf |
title_full_unstemmed |
Breaking All the Rules: The First Recorded Hard Substrate Sessile Benthic Community Far Beneath an Antarctic Ice Shelf |
title_sort |
breaking all the rules: the first recorded hard substrate sessile benthic community far beneath an antarctic ice shelf |
publisher |
Frontiers Media SA |
publishDate |
2021 |
url |
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.642040 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.642040/full |
genre |
Antarc* Antarctic Filchner Ronne Ice Shelf Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf Ice Shelf Ice Shelves Ronne Ice Shelf |
genre_facet |
Antarc* Antarctic Filchner Ronne Ice Shelf Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf Ice Shelf Ice Shelves Ronne Ice Shelf |
op_source |
Frontiers in Marine Science volume 8 ISSN 2296-7745 |
op_rights |
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.642040 |
container_title |
Frontiers in Marine Science |
container_volume |
8 |
_version_ |
1810495421420666880 |