May 21, 2021 08:33 AM EDT
In spite southern summer season, the freezing temperature in Antarctica is still prevalent, but there s no stopping James Smith and his team, geologists of the British Antarctic Survey, to camp out in the middle of Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf for the name of science.
The goal of Smith and his team was to collect a seafloor sediment locked under a half mile of ice. It took 20 hours to dig through 20 tons of snow pumped through a pipe lowered down a borehole, creating 20,000 liters of hot water.
Once they were able to pierce through the shelf, they lowered an instrument to collect the sediment, along with a GoPro camera, each roundtrip taking about an hour. Unfortunately, after several attempts, the collector failed to fetch a sediment, but the team accidentally discovered something unknown until then: life beneath Antarctic ice shelf.