The invisible life hidden beneath Antarcticas ice Ariel Waldman
Can you guess what this is?
What if I told you there’s a place
where the creatures are made of glass?
Or that there are life-forms
that are invisible to us,
but astronauts see them all the time?
These invisible glass creatures
aren’t aliens on a faraway exoplanet.
They’re diatoms:
photosynthetic, single-celled algae
responsible for producing oxygen
and helping seed clouds
on a planetary scale
and with intricately sculpted,
geometric exoskeletons made of –
yeah, glass.
You can see them in swirls
of ocean-surface colors from space.
And when they die,
their glass houses sink
to the depths of the oceans,
taking carbon out of the air
and with them to the grave,
accounting for a significant amount
of carbon sequestration in the oceans.
We live on an alien planet.
There is so much weird life
here on Earth to study,
and so much of it lives
at the edges of our world,
of our sight and of our understanding.
One of those edges is Antarctica.
Typically, when we think about Antarctica,
we think of a place
that’s barren and lifeless …
except for a few penguins.
But Antarctica should instead
be known as a polar oasis of life,
host to countless creatures
that are utterly fascinating.
So why haven’t we seen them
on the latest nature documentary?
Well, they lurk beneath the snow and ice,
virtually invisible to us.
They’re microbes:
tiny plants and animals living
embedded inside of glaciers,
underneath the sea ice
and swimming in subglacial ponds.
And they’re no less charismatic
than any of the megafauna
that you’re used to seeing
in a nature documentary.
But how do you compel people
to explore what they can’t see?
I recently led a five-week
expedition to Antarctica
to essentially become a wildlife
filmmaker at the microbial scale.
With 185 pounds of gear,
I boarded a military aircraft
and brought microscopes into the field
to film and investigate
these microscopic extremophiles,
so that we can become more familiar
with a poorly understood ecosystem
that we live with here on Earth.
To film these invisible
creatures in action,
I needed to see where they call home –
I needed to venture under the ice.
Every year, the sea ice nearly doubles
the entire size of Antarctica.
To get a glimpse below
the nine-feet-thick ice,
I climbed down a long, metal tube
inserted into the sea ice
to witness a hidden
ecosystem full of life,
while being suspended between the seafloor
and the illuminated ceiling of ice.
Here’s what that looked like
from the outside.
It was just absolutely magical.
Some of the critters I found
were delightful things like seed shrimp
and many more beautiful,
geometric diatoms.
I then went farther afield
to camp out in the Dry Valleys
for a couple of weeks.
98 percent of Antarctica
is covered with ice
and the Dry Valleys are the largest area
of Antarctica where you can actually see
what the continent itself
looks like underneath all of it.
I sampled bacteria at Blood Falls,
a natural phenomenon of a subglacial pond
spurting out iron oxide
that was thought to be utterly lifeless
until a little more than a decade ago.
And I hiked up a glacier
to drill down into it,
revealing countless, hardcore critters
living their best lives
while embedded inside layers of ice.
Known as cryoconite holes,
they form when tiny pieces
of darkly colored dirt
get blown onto the glacier
and begin to melt down into soupy holes
that then freeze over,
preserving hundreds of dirt pucks
inside the glacier,
like little island universes
each with its own unique ecosystem.
Some of the critters I found
you may recognize,
like this adorable tardigrade –
I absolutely love them,
they’re like little
gummy bears with claws.
Also known as a water bear,
they’re famous for possessing superpowers
that allow them to survive
in extreme conditions,
including the vacuum of space.
But you don’t need to travel to space
or even Antarctica to find them.
They live in moss all over this planet,
from sidewalk cracks to parks.
You likely walk right by tons
of these invisible animals every day.
Others may look familiar,
but be stranger still, like nematodes.
Not a snake nor an earthworm,
nematodes are a creature all of their own.
They can’t regenerate like an earthworm
or crawl like a snake,
but they have tiny, dagger-like
needles inside their mouths
that some of them use to spearfish
their prey and suck out the insides.
For every single human on this planet,
there exist 57 billion nematodes.
And some of the critters
you may not recognize at all
but live out equally fascinating lives,
such as rotifers with amazing crowns
that turn into Roomba-like mouths,
ciliates with digestive systems
so transparent that it’s almost TMI,
and cyanobacteria that look like party
confetti exploded all over a petri dish.
A lot of times what we see
in popular media
are scanning electron microscope
images of microorganisms
looking like scary monsters.
Without seeing them move
their lives remain elusive to us
despite them living nearly
everywhere we step outside.
What’s their daily life like?
How do they interact
with their environment?
If you only ever saw a photo
of a penguin at a zoo,
but you never saw one waddle around
and then glide over ice,
you wouldn’t fully understand penguins.
By seeing microcreatures in motion,
we gain better insights into the lives
of the otherwise invisible.
Without documenting the invisible life
in Antarctica and our own backyards,
we don’t understand just how many
creatures we share our world with.
And that means we don’t yet
have the full picture
of our weird and whimsical home planet.
Thank you.