“What we have found is that these are very sensitive areas to the stability of how dynamic the ice is and how fast the ice may react to increases of melting both from the ocean and the atmosphere.”

　　Among the new instruments built for the project was a powerful hot water drill. The researchers used the drill to dig down some 740 meters. They collected water, sediment and other material from the grounding zone.

　　Working around the clock before the deep hole refroze, they sent a video camera down to the 400­square­meter undersea area.

　　Reed Scherer says the video images they saw in the Command Center were a total surprise.

　　“It?s a very mobile environment. The bottom is changing constantly. And so the things that we saw were all very mobile organisms, things that swim and some things that crawl. And obviously they are getting enough nutrition that they can thrive. Some of the little crustacean­like creatures called amphipods that we saw swam quite quickly and were quite active.”

　　This is the farthest south that fish have ever been seen. How did the creatures get here? What do they feed on? And what effect will the retreating ice have on them?

　　Ross Powell says the ice and sediment cores taken from the grounding zone can offer clues.

　　“We know that the ice is melting there at the moment and so by opening up the cores once they get back, we hope to be able to understand what the ice was doing in the past, relative to what it is doing now. And because it is melting so fast or seems to be melting fast at the moment, we anticipate that there will be some differences that we’ll see in the history of the ice sheet from the sediment cores, once, we open them up.” But Ross Powell says the work raises more questions than it answers.

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