Friday, January 07, 2011

New life exposed in Antarctica?

A huge large chunk of ice has broken off the Antarctic mass, and Australian biologists see opportunity. (In this case, it has nothing to do with climate change, by the way.) An expedition is going after new species that may have been exposed for the first time after a major change in the ice cover. A collision between ice masses broke off a chunk 40x80 km. Now, as one scientist puts it, The calving of the iceberg has exposed parts of the seabed that haven't been available to us for study in our lifetimes. So we just don't know what we'll see under there - they've been buried under 400 metres of ice for the last 80 years or so."

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