March 24, 2025: An unexpected look underneath a glacier. Plus, Kanzi the bonobo dies, and this prenatal test can detect cancer in the mother. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | The ice front left behind where the iceberg calved off in the Bellingshausen Sea.Alex Ingle/Schmidt Ocean Institute | | | Glacial Creatures of the Deep | In January, an ice shelf the size of Chicago broke off a glacier in Antarctica's Bellingshausen Sea. A nearby science research ship, on a mission to study organisms on the arctic seafloor, quickly changed plans and set off to investigate what creatures they might find under the newly calved George VI ice shelf. The researchers sent their underwater robot SuBastian into the deep and found an ecosystem filled with anemones, sea spiders, icefish, octopuses and even some completely new species of snails, worms and fish.
Why this is interesting: Peering under a recently-calved glacier is a bit like turning over a log in the forest to see all the creatures that live beneath it. Plus, the Bellingshausen Sea is relatively unexplored in terms of deep-sea biodiversity, so this was a rare chance.
What the experts say: "We thought we might see some life there, but it was really surprising to see the degree to which life was thriving in such a hostile environment," says the expedition's co-chief scientist Sasha Montelli of University College London. "And it wasn't just existing there but had apparently been sustained for a very long time." | | | ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean Institute | A large sponge, a cluster of anemones, and other life living nearly 230 meters deep at an area of the seabed that was very recently covered by the George VI Ice Shelf in Antarctica. Sponges can grow very slowly, sometimes less than two centimeters a year, so the size of this specimen suggests this community has been active for decades, perhaps even hundreds of years. | | | Alex Ingle/Schmidt Ocean Institute | Expedition's co-chief scientist Patricia Esquete of the Center for Environmental and Marine Studies and the University of Aveiro in Portugal inspects a suspected new species of isopod that was sampled from the bottom of the Bellingshausen Sea. It will take scientists years to describe all of the new species found during this expedition. | | | Dennis Hong is a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at UCLA and the director of the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory. His robots range from floating balloons with spindly legs to thick-thighed humanoid creations that dominate on the soccer pitch. He recently sat down with Science, Quickly host Rachel Feltman to talk about the custom robot he built for the new sci-fi movie on Netflix called The Electric State. | | | • About 20 pedestrians are killed each day in the U.S. by someone driving a car. Pedestrian fatality rates are dropping in most other wealthy nations, but not here, writes Megha Satyanarayana, chief opinion editor at Scientific American. Banishing cars in many places is not realistic (especially where public transportation is lacking), but we should be making roads more walkable by making them safer—better lighting, bigger sidewalks, more pronounced crosswalks, she says. "Public officials must understand where people need to walk and make those places safer. Drivers, fighting distraction and deadlines, must look out for pedestrians. Automakers must take pedestrian safety into account for once, calling off their lobbyists trying to block sensible regulations that would save lives." | 5 min read | | | It's easy to forget that an entire world of living creatures and habitats exists below the ocean surface. A few years ago, I wrote about the nighttime vertical migration of tiny sea creatures that thrive in darkness in the planet's oceans—an estimated 11 billion tons of animal biomass travels miles upward each night to feed and then, before dawn, returns back to the dimly lit "twilight zone" below. We hope to someday discover life somewhere out in space. But there's plenty of alien-like creatures right here in the deep places of the world. | Welcome to a new week of discovery! Send questions or thoughts to: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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