Life thrives where one least expects it. In a surprising discovery about where life can exist, scientists for the first time found a curious shrimp like creature and a piece of a jellyfish beneath a massive Antarctic ice sheet. Six hundred feet below the ice where no light shines, scientists had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could exist. One day a scientist dropped a probe and camera beneath this thick glacier and found something more than mere microbes. Shrimp are swimming crustaceans found widely around the world in both fresh and salt water. Shrimp are an important food source for larger animals from fish to whales. Shrimp are small creatures but definitely larger than microscopic microbes. Technically, the “shrimp” is not a shrimp but a Lyssianasid amphipod, which is distantly related to shrimp. A finding of such a creature implies other larger organisms that feed off shrimp. There is also another problem though. Under the glacier it is very cold and dark. Both conditions are quite forbidding for any life. So how can it be? “We were operating on the presumption that nothing's there,” said NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will be presenting the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical Union this month. “It was a shrimp you'd enjoy having on your plate.” “We were just gaga over it,” he said of the 3 inch long, orange critter starring in their two minute video. The video is likely to inspire experts to rethink what they know about life in harsh environments. And it has scientists musing that if shrimp like creatures can be found below 600 feet of Antarctic ice in subfreezing dark water, what about other hostile places? What about Europa, a frozen moon of Jupiter? Many have speculated that under its thick surface ice layer lies a vast and frigid ocean. If the Antarctic shrimp can survive under a glacier perhaps its distant cousins can too. Most planetary scientists believe that a layer of liquid water exists beneath Europa's surface, kept warm by tidally-generated heat. Surface temperature average about −260
