Many New Species Found Under Antarctica

gt_mattex writes to tell us The Globe and Mail is reporting that quite a few new species have been found in the ocean beneath the Antarctic ice. From the article: "It is too early to say exactly how many new species were discovered in the Antarctic, many in the Weddell Sea, where ice crushed the ship of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton in 1915. The scientists saw more strange creatures than familiar ones, says Ron O'Dor, an expert in octopuses and squid from Halifax's Dalhousie University and the chief scientist in charge of producing the first marine life census of the planet by 2010."

Let me get in my boat before you start research...

[the_tsi]

Is this the initial stage of the Second Impact?

Re:Amazing

[LiquidMind]

i've been thinking about that too, especially about the life that resides at the bottom of our oceans....
how interesting (and suicidal, but bear with me) would it be to somehow drain all the oceans of water just to see what's left over...

i'm with you

[circletimessquare]

take the common wood louse [google.com], that you can find under any rock in any forest

now, blow it up a thousand fold in size

there you go [google.com], running around the ocean floor

amazing indeed

Oh, that's easy.

[jd]

You label everything as one or more of "sushi", "chowder" or "probably made into soup somewhere". Saves on physiological and genetic analysis, and it's all that Joe Average is likely to care about. (If the average person gave a rat's about conservation or science, we'd be a thousand years more advanced and ten thousand years wiser.)

Besides, in 15 years or less there won't be enough of a food chain in the oceans to sustain most of the organisms that do still exist and without a gene bank capable of storing that kind of volume of information there's no possibility of either having any usable data OR being able to revive the ecology once conditions have returned to saner levels. Collecting photos is all fine and good, but in not that long a time that is ALL we'll have, unless serious efforts are made to either conserve or genetically catalog.

(And, frankly, I can't see the US Government even getting past the planning stages in a mere 15 years - assuming it even got that far. As they're the only group with the clout and the money to build a center capable of analyzing and storing a few hundred million DNA/mtDNA databases in that kind of timeframe, most of the information currently in the oceans is beyond any possibility of recovery.)

Re:At The Mountains of Madness

[bsa3]

Actually, the parties to the Dresden Agreement of 1931 have sent repeated followup expeditions, but the crawling chaos got them all. And the Russians are deploying shoggoths in attack mode in the Khyber pass... sucks to be in that universe, I gather. (The robot to be slurped is "A Colder War" [infinityplus.co.uk] by Charles Stross [antipope.org]. Highly recommended.)

Re:i'm with you

[Lord_Dweomer]

I knew I'd see some of these. For any slashdotters who want to see a FASCINATING and beautifully produced BBC documentary on this, I recommend episode 2 "The Deep" from their award-winning "The Blue Planet" series. Here's a direct .torrent link.

BBC The Blue Planet: The Deep .torrent [mininova.org]

Lake Vostok

[Timbotronic]

It'll be interesting to see what they find in Lake Vostok [wikipedia.org], which is a freshwater lake as big as Lake Ontario and has been sealed under Antarctic ice for up to a million years.

Could be the perfect test for a Cryobot mission to Europa [space.com]

Re:Amazing

[geobeck]

It's been millenia and we still don't know all the life on our planet. I always look forward to articles like this, they really tell us how little we do know.

I just finished a Microbiology intro course where the instructor kept stressing that. You think it's amazing how many macroscopic species we are still discovering; that's nothing compared to the unknown species of bacteria that are right under our noses--and that could be quite literal.

It seems that life on Earth, as far as the number of species is concerned, consists of bacteria, beetles, and assorted debris.

(After Asimov: "The Solar System consists of the Sun, Jupiter, and assorted debris."

Re:Let me get in my boat before you start research

[PrinceOfStorms]

And for those who don't even get the "NGE" reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Genesis_Evangeli on_glossary#Second_Impact [wikipedia.org].

(And yes, I had to look it up myself.)

Re:i'm with you

[MrOuija_AK]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophyophore [wikipedia.org]