Shrimp-Like Creature Discovered at Windless Bight, Antarctica - 600 Feet Beneath Ice Sheet
At a depth of 600 feet beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet, a small shrimp-like creature managed to brighten up an otherwise gray polar day in late November 2009. This critter is a three-inch long Lyssianasid amphipod found beneath the Ross Ice Shelf, about 12.5 miles away from open water in the region called Windless Bight. NASA scientists were using a borehole camera to look back up towards the ice surface when they spotted this pinkish-orange creature swimming beneath the ice.
Lyssianasid amphipod found under the ice at the Windless Bight. Windless Bight is 15.5 miles to the northeast of McMurdo Station
and 14.3 miles south of Mount Erebus.
This is the same image without labels. Note there is no open water in view. The closest open water is 12.5 miles away from Windless Bight.
A wider view of the Windless Bight region where the surprise discovery was made.
The same image as above without labels.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
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Animator
- Lori Perkins (NASA/GSFC)
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Scientists
- Bob Bindschadler (NASA/GSFC)
- Alberto Behar (NASA/JPL CalTech)
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Writer
- Sarah DeWitt (NASA/GSFC)
Release date
This page was originally published on Wednesday, March 17, 2010.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:54 PM EDT.
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Papers used in this visualization
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/antarctic-shrimp.html
Datasets used in this visualization
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Band Combination 3, 2, 1 [Landsat-7: ETM+]
ID: 537This dataset can be found at: http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/about/wrs.html
See all pages that use this dataset -
LIMA (Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica) [Landsat-7: ETM+]
ID: 599Mosaicing to avoid clouds produced a high quality, nearly cloud-free benchmark data set of Antarctica for the International Polar Year from images collected primarily during 1999-2003.
This dataset can be found at: http://lima.nasa.gov/
See all pages that use this dataset
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