From New Scientist:
Life found beneath Antarctic ice sheet ‘shouldn’t be there’
The inadvertent discovery of sea life on a boulder beneath an Antarctic ice shelf challenges our understanding of how organisms can live in environments far from sunlight, according to a team of biologists.
James Smith and Paul Anker at the British Antarctic Survey drilled through the 900-metre-thick Filchner-Ronne ice shelf and dropped a camera down the hole in search of mud on the seabed. To their surprise, it revealed a boulder ringed by animals. Footage appears to show 16 sponges, accompanied by 22 unidentified animals that could include barnacles. It is the first time that immobile life like these creatures has been found beneath an Antarctic ice sheet.
“There’s all sorts of reasons they shouldn’t be there,” says Huw Griffiths at the British Antarctic Survey, who analysed the footage. He thinks the animals, which are probably filter feeders, survive on nutrients carried in the -2°C water. The conundrum is that they are so far from obvious nutrient sources, given that the boulder is located 260 kilometres from the open water at the front of the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf where photosynthetic organisms can survive.
This happens all the time. Scientists say “life shouldn’t be able to exist there” then they find it.
The Soviets irradiated a forest in the Ukraine by blowing up a nuclear reactor.
Guess what? Animals are thriving there.
Bottom of the deepest trenches in our oceans? Yup, crabs and tube worms and such.
A boiling geyser? There’s life there too.
I’m convinced that if or when we get to Europa, Ganymede, or Enceladus, and we drill under the ice, we’re going to find life.
Maybe not intelligent life, but definitely a sponge or lichen or something else growing on a rock.
One theme of a number of SF stories (short stories typically) is amoeba-like life that uses superfluid liquid helium instead of protein for its protoplasm. Life at 1 degree Kelvin…
Are you perhaps thinking of the Niven story, “Wait it Out?”
Yes, that’s one, but I think there were others — can’t put my fingers on the titles right now.
Hm… In the Niven Known Space universe, there were the Outsiders – creatures of the deep void who looked like cat’o’nine tails, if I recall properly. They appeared in multiple stories.
Getting more otherworldly, Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee saga had the photino birds, which quite literally were made of the parts of the universe we can’t interact with except through gravity … Anyway, not them; nothing else comes immediately to mind, but of course that just means if you remember it, I have something else to add to my reading stack. 🙂
Can we get a welfare check on Kurt Russell?
“… but definitely a sponge or lichen or something else growing on a rock.”
So … Progressives?