Images of creatures found on the seafloor in Antarctica when a large iceberg broke off the George VI Ice Shelf Photo: ROV SuBastian, Alex Ingle, Schmidt Ocean Institute
Giant sea spiders, icefish with milky-white blood and 200 year-old coral communities are some of the creatures scientists came across when an iceberg the size of Chicago broke off.
Thom Linley, a deep-sea fish expert and a curator of fishes at Te Papa was the only New Zealander on board the ship run by US research organisation Schmidt Institute as it headed towards the Bellingshausen Sea by Antarctica in January.
During the trip and iceberg broke clean from the George VI Ice Shelf, exposing 510 square kilometres of previously inaccessible ocean.
Linley told Nine to Noon, it meant scientists were able to spend eight days studying the seafloor with a remote control camera.
What was found, Linley said, was a thriving ecosystem.
"We'd been keeping an eye on the ice, dodging icebergs and we could see this ice shelf sticking out from the sea bed.
"It's so big it looks like the land. It was a hazard for a while."
The ice broke off over the span of a week, Linley said, giving those on board the opportunity to map a "totally new area".
"We got down there and there was this mature community of corals and sea sponges growing for hundreds of years.
A stalk of deep-sea coral documented 1200 meters deep. Photo: ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute
"It was a complex environment, rather than just a few species just hanging on...it shows us it was incredibly stable and existed for a very long time."
The sea ranged in depth from 600 metres to 1.3km, Linley said.
At the lowest depth, he said the coral was "beautiful colours" of pastel, peach and cream.
His favourite fine had been the crocodile ice fish, which had milky-white blood and managed ice forming in its cells to avoid freezing.
While the fish were common in Antarctica, he said, they were not found anywhere else in the world.
There were also sea spiders, which Linley admitted made him "a little nervous", that looked as though a child had made them out of pipe cleaners.
He said they were big enough to fill a dinner plate, with an orangey colour, long legs and slow, spindly movement.
He described a phantom jellyfish with a deep purple dome and long flowing tentacles which "looked almost like a duvet trailing behind it", along with glacial squid, were "pretty unreported".
A giant phantom jelly is documented in the Bellingshausen Sea. Photo: ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute
"A couple of species we saw which had never been seen alive before. We could see how they hold their bodies and swim."
Linley said ice shelving was a natural process, but noted icebergs were breaking off "much quicker" in the last decade due to changes in the climate.
He said the information collected during the trip would be made publicly available.
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