All posts by Archaeology World Team

ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

Massive Ancient City Containing Huge Pyramid Unearthed in China

Massive Ancient City Containing Huge Pyramid Unearthed in China

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of an ancient lost city in China where human sacrifice was practised. The Neolithic site known as Shimao, in present-day Shaanxi province, was once thought to be an unexcavated part of the Great Wall of China.

The pyramid was decorated with eye symbols and “anthropomorphic,” or part-human, part-animal faces.

Those figures “may have endowed the stepped pyramid with special religious power and further strengthened the general visual impression on its large audience,” the archaeologists wrote in the article. 

This figure shows images of the step pyramid. a) part of the stone buttresses of the second and the third steps of the pyramid; b) eye symbols that decorate the pyramid c) a view of the buttresses under excavation; d) a general view of the pyramid before excavation.

For five centuries, a city flourished around the pyramid. At one time, the city encompassed an area of 988 acres (400 hectares), making it one of the largest in the world, the archaeologists wrote. Today, the ruins of the city are called “Shimao,” but its name in ancient times is unknown.

The pyramid contains 11 steps, each of which was lined with stone. On the topmost step, there “were extensive palaces built of rammed earth, with wooden pillars and roofing tiles, a gigantic water reservoir, and domestic remains related to daily life,” the researchers wrote.

The city’s rulers lived in these palaces, and art and craft production were carried out nearby. “Evidence so far suggests that the stepped pyramid complex functioned not only as a residential space for ruling Shimao elites but also as a space for artisanal or industrial craft production,” the archaeologists wrote.

A sacrificial pit of human skulls discovered at Shimao. The people sacrificed may have been captives captured in war. This photo was first published in 2016 in an article in the Chinese language journal Kaogu yu wenwu.

A series of stone walls with ramparts and gates was built around the pyramid and the city. “At the entrance to the stepped pyramid were sophisticated bulwarks [defensive walls] whose design suggests that they were intended to provide both defense and highly restricted access,” the archaeologists wrote.

The remains of numerous human sacrifices have been discovered at Shimao. “In the outer gateway of the eastern gate on the outer rampart alone, six pits containing decapitated human heads have been found,” the archaeologists wrote.

Some of the victims may be from another archaeological site called Zhukaigou, which is located to the north of Shimao, and the people of Shimao may have conquered the neighbouring site.

“Morphological analysis of the human remains suggests that the victims may have been related to the residents of Zhukaigou, which could further suggest that they were taken to Shimao as captives during the expansion of the Shimao polity,” the study said.

Additionally, jade artefacts were inserted into spaces between the blocks in all of Shimao’s structures. “The jade objects and human sacrifice may have imbued the very walls of Shimao with ritual and religious potency,” the archaeologists wrote.

While archaeologists have known about Shimao for many years, it was once thought to be part of the Great Wall of China, a section of which is located nearby.

It wasn’t until excavations were carried out in recent years that archaeologists realized that Shimao is far older than the Great Wall, which was built between 2,700 and 400 years ago.

The pyramid and the surrounding area were fortified with ramparts

The team of archaeologists that wrote the article includes Li Jaang, a professor at the School of History at Zhengzhou University; Zhouyong Sun and Jing Shao, who are both archaeologists at the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology; and Min Li, an anthropology professor at UCLA.

ASIA, INDONESIA, WORLD

World’s Oldest Art Identified in Half-Million-Year-Old Zigzag

World’s Oldest Art Identified in Half-Million-Year-Old Zigzag

About half a million years ago, early homo Erectus on java was already using freshwater mussel shells as weapons and as a “canvas” for engraving. An international team of researchers, led by Leiden archaeologist José Joordens, published this discovery Nature.

The discovery provides new insights into the evolution of human behaviour.

Not only Homo sapiens made engravings

“Until this discovery, it was assumed that comparable engravings were only made by modern humans (Homo sapiens) in Africa, starting about 100,000 years ago,” says lead author José Joordens, a researcher at the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University.

World’s Oldest Art Identified in Half-Million-Year-Old Zigzag
Scientists found deliberate scratching on a fossil Pseudodon, likely an engraving made by Homo erectus at Trinil in Indonesia.

A team of 21 researchers studied hundreds of fossil shells and associated finds and sediments from the Homo erectus site Trinil, on the Indonesian island of Java.

The shells are part of the Dubois Collection that has been held at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center since the end of the 19th century. The shells were excavated by the Dutch physician and researcher Eugène Dubois, the discoverer of Pithecanthropus erectus — now known as Homo erectus.

Engravings older than weathering

The discovery of an engraved geometrical pattern on one of the shells came as a total surprise. The zig-zag pattern, which can only be seen with oblique lighting, is clearly older than the weathering processes on the shell arising from fossilization.

The study has excluded the possibility that the pattern could have been caused by animals or by natural weathering processes and shows that the ‘zigzag’ pattern is the work of Homo erectus.

Five hundred thousand years old

By applying two dating methods, researchers at the VU University Amsterdam and Wageningen University have determined that the shell with the engraving is minimally 430,000 and maximally 540,000 years old. This means that the engraving is at least four times older than the previously oldest known engravings, found in Africa.

Purpose or meaning of the engraving?

“It’s fantastic that this engraved shell has been discovered in a museum collection where it has been held for more than a hundred years. I can imagine people may be wondering whether this can be seen as a form of early art,” says Wil Roebroeks, Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology at Leiden University.

Viewed up close, one fossil Pseudodon shell from Java shows evidence of engraving.
See the hole on the inside of this fossil Pseudodon shell? Homo erectus likely bored into the shell at exactly at the spot where the adductor muscle attaches to pop it open.

He was able to finance this long-term research with his NWO Spinoza Prize. “At the moment we have no clue about the meaning or purpose of this engraving.”

Early human-like mussel collector

This research has shown that these early human-like people were very clever about how they opened these large freshwater mussels; they drilled a hole through the shell using a sharp object, possibly a shark’s tooth, exactly at the point where the muscle is attached that keeps the shell closed.

“The precision with which these early humans worked indicates great dexterity and detailed knowledge of mollusc anatomy,” says Frank Wesselingh, a researcher and expert on fossil shells at Naturalis. The molluscs were eaten and the empty shells were used to manufacture tools, such as knives.

Possible follow-on research

This discovery from the historical Dubois collection sheds unexpected new light on the skills and behavior of Homo erectus and indicates that Asia is a promising and, so far, relatively unexplored area for finding intriguing artifacts.

From the Netherlands, researchers at Leiden University, the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the universities of Wageningen and Delft, and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands were involved in the research.

This research is being financed by research funding from the NWO Spinoza Prize.

EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

Renovations Reveal Twelfth-Century Bath House in Spain

Renovations Reveal Twelfth-Century Bath House in Spain

According to an El País report, renovation of a popular tapas bar on Seville’s Mateos Gago Street revealed the walls and skylights of a twelfth-century hammam, or bathhouse, built during the rule of the Almohad Caliphate. 

Renovations Reveal Twelfth-Century Bath House in Spain
The 12th-century bathhouse discovered in the popular bar Cervecería Giralda, in Seville.

On Mateos Gago Street, in the southern Spanish city of Seville, the hammam is situated only a few meters from the Roman Catholic cathedral of the city, and for a century it has been one of the most crowded Arab baths in the city.  The thing is, customers were not going there to immerse themselves in water, but rather to pour the liquid down their throats: the baths were concealed under a popular bar named Cervecería Giralda.

In the early 1900s, the architect Vicente Traver converted the building into a hotel, thus concealing (and preserving) a bathhouse dating back to the 12th century, during the days of the Almohad Caliphate that ruled Al-Andalus.

The ancient structure emerged again last summer when the bar underwent some renovation work. The work exposed high-quality murals that are unique to Spain and Portugal.

The find came as a big surprise as everyone had previously thought the structure was nothing more than “a Neo-Mudejar pastiche,” in the words of Fran Díaz, the architect in charge of the refurbishment.

Paintings in one of the vaults of the hammam discovered in Seville.

“The most important thing is that we realized the bath was completely painted, from top to bottom, with high-quality geometric decoration,” says Álvaro Jiménez, an archeologist who has supervised the work. “The drawings were made in red ochre on white, and large fragments were preserved on the walls and vaulted ceilings. This is the only surviving Arab bath with an integral decoration; until now, the only known examples had painted just on the baseboards.”

“It’s been a complete surprise. This is an important discovery that gives us an idea of what other baths might have looked like during the Almohad period, especially in Seville, which was one of the two capitals of the empire together with Marrakech,” adds the archeologist Fernando Amores, who collaborated on the project. “The hammam is very near the site of the main mosque, which was also built in the 12th century, and which also explains its much richer decorative elements.”

The first probes under the false ceilings at Giralda – one of the most popular venues in Seville’s historic center – soon unearthed several different kinds of skylights known as luceras. This discovery triggered a completely different approach to the reform work, which began focusing on the complete recovery of the Arab baths.

“Given the relevance of the finds, architecture took a step back and made way for archeology. The solution we found to preserve the baths while allowing the space to keep functioning as a bar was to use a metal cornice to crown the traditional wall tiles put there by Vicente Traver and which are now a part of the establishment’s personality; the original wooden bar counter has also been preserved,” notes Fran Díaz.

The cold room of the hammam at Cervecería Giralda

The 202-square-meter tapas bar, which opened in 1923, will continue in operation when the work ends next month.

The venue’s main space, where the bar counter is located, was once the warm room of the hammam, a space covering 6.70 square meters with an eight-sided vaulted ceiling resting on four columns. One side opens into a rectangular room with a barrel vault that is 4.10 meters wide and 13 meters long, once serving as the bath’s cold room. The kitchen area is where the hot room must have been, although the only remaining vestige is a portion of an arch.

The baths were accessed from Don Remondo street, where the dry area used to be, notes Álvaro Jiménez, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the remains of the Almohad mosque, now the site of Seville’s Roman Catholic cathedral.

The restoration work unveiled 88 skylights in different shapes and sizes, such as stars, lobulated designs, and octagons, that together are much more elaborate than decorations found in other Arab baths from the same period.

Amores also highlights the paintings in the arches of the warm room, made in a zigzagging style meant to represent water. “Nearly all the representations in the Islamic world allude to paradise,” he notes.

The uniqueness of this bath does not rest solely on its latticed paintings, but also on the five rows of skylights in the cold room – other baths have three, and sometimes just one. The cold room, which for the last century has served as the bar’s eating area, lost two meters in 1928 when Mateos Gago street was widened.

A geometric design above the door leading to the cold room of the baths.

In order to understand the structure of the baths, which were typically built by the state and handed over to third parties for management, an expert named Margarita de Alba used photogrammetry techniques to recreate what these spaces must have looked like in the 12th century when Seville was known as Isbilia.

“There is documentary evidence in Christian texts from 1281 about the so-called baths of García Jofre, described as adjoining a property given by King Alfonso X to the Church of Seville. The next testimony is from the 17th-century historian Rodrigo Caro, who said that the vault you see when you enter from Borceguinería [the earlier name for Mateos Gago street] is not a bath, writing: ‘I’d sooner believe these are relics from some circus or amphitheater.’

Even the art historian José Gestoso said the vault is ‘of Mauritanian tradition, a construction that is frequently seen in Seville monuments from the 15th and 16th centuries,” says Jiménez, illustrating how popular belief held that the García Jofre bath had disappeared due to the passage of time.

But it was there the whole time. In the 17th century, there was a major reform that took down the vault in the warm room and rebuilt a much lower one to make room for an extra floor above it. “The building was ‘Italianized’ and the original columns, probably made from reused Roman columns, were replaced with others made with Genoese marble. All the skylights were shut. Our theory is that it became the premises for a merchant who built his home over the shop,” adds Jiménez.

The 20th-century architect Vicente Traver could have torn down the remains of the bathhouse, but he chose to protect and preserve them. And now, customers of Cervecería Giralda know that they are having their beers inside an Almohad hammam.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Forgotten Graves Found at Florida African American Cemetery

Forgotten Graves Found at Florida African American Cemetery

WJCT Public Media reports that recent excavations have confirmed the presence of 29 grave shafts detected last year during a ground-penetrating radar survey at the site of North Greenwood Cemetery, an African American cemetery that operated from 1940 to 1954.

Archeologists looking at a “forgotten” Clearwater cemetery say that they have found almost 30 grave shafts.

Archaeologists from the Florida Public Archaeology Network, based out of the University of South Florida, and Tampa engineering firm, Cardno Inc., provided a final update on the North Greenwood Cemetery excavation Friday.

The process was done to verify the location of unmarked graves in the African-American cemetery that was identified previously.

“We’ve located a total of 29 graves, and that confirms the data of the results of the ground-penetrating radar survey that was conducted last year, in February and August,” said USF archeologist Jeff Moates.

The archaeologists opened three large areas for excavation, and, in addition to the graves, found a number of artifacts, including two dimes from 1942 and a penny from 1940.

During excavation of the former North Greenwood cemetery site in Clearwater, archaeologists discovered 29 grave shafts, as well as artifacts like this dimes.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, the North Greenwood Cemetery was in operation between 1940 and 1954, explaining the coins from that time period.

The land was sold to make room for Pinellas High School and a city pool. The remains of 350 people were moved to Parklawn Memorial Cemetery in Dunedin, but nearby residents of the Clearwater Heights neighborhood felt that the bodies in unmarked graves were left behind.

The excavation revealed that may indeed be the case.

“We’ve uncovered material that you would expect to be associated with graves,” said Moates. “There’s evidence of coffin hardware, decayed remains of coffins, concrete vaults, associated gravestone or headstone materials that are in a kind of a disturbed state.”

“We found an intact aluminum grave marker in the name of the deceased individual, Mr. William Ridley, who was buried in 1951,” Moates added.

During excavation of the former North Greenwood cemetery site in Clearwater, archaeologists discovered 29 grave shafts, as well as artifacts like this grave marker.
Artifacts like this grave marker were of the many found during the excavation process.

Once the community knew that the excavation process was happening, people like O’Neill Larkin, 81, wanted to share their memories of North Greenwood.

“He remembers playing on this cemetery as a boy, there was a popular swimming hole located nearby and Stevenson Creek,” said Moates. “But he remembers coming through here and hunting rabbits and quail and pigeon with his friends. He also had a friend who was a Boy Scout, who unfortunately died on a Boy Scout trip, and was buried in the cemetery.

“And so it’s just stories like that, that the community were able to come by and connect, share with us connecting the memories of this place to the actual physical remains of what they remember to be here.”

North Greenwood is just the latest in a number of forgotten Black cemeteries around the region and state that are being investigated following the discovery of the Zion Cemetery in Tampa in 2019.

Archaeologists will conduct a further study of the recovered objects and share their findings with the City of Clearwater and the local chapter of the NAACP.

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

The Oldest City in The Americas Is an Archeological Wonder, And It’s Under Invasion

The Oldest City in The Americas Is an Archeological Wonder, And It’s Under Invasion

The oldest archaeological site in the Americas, having survived for 5,000 years, is under threat from squatters that claim that the coronavirus pandemic has left them with no other option but to occupy the sacred city.

The government wants to take all of the items found from archaeological sites for national security. Because of this, Ruth Shady, who archives the items before, and after she is done, she has been threatened with death.

Archaeologists told an AFP team visiting Caral that squatter invasions and destruction began in March when the pandemic forced a nationwide lockdown.

An agricultural area that has invaded the protected site.

“There are people who come and invade this site, which is state property, and they use it to plant,” archaeologist Daniel Mayta told AFP.

“It’s hugely harmful because they’re destroying 5,000-year-old cultural evidence.”

Caral is situated in the valley of the Supe river some 182 kilometres (110 miles) north of the capital Lima and 20km from the Pacific Ocean to the west.

Developed between 3,000 and 1,800 BCE in an arid desert, Caral is the cradle of civilization in the Americas. Its people were contemporaries of Pharaonic Egypt and the great Mesopotamian civilizations. It pre-dates the far better known Inca empire by 45 centuries.

None of that mattered to the squatters, though, who took advantage of the minimal police surveillance during 107 days of lockdown to take over 10 hectares of the Chupacigarro archaeological site and plant avocados, fruit trees, and lima beans.

“The families don’t want to leave,” said Mayta, 36.

“We explained to them that this site is a (UNESCO) World Heritage site and what they’re doing is serious and could see them go to jail.”

Death threats

Shady is the director of the Caral archaeological zone and has been managing the investigations since 1996 when excavations began. She says that land traffickers – who occupy state or protected land illegally to sell it for private gain – are behind the invasions.

“We’re receiving threats from people who are taking advantage of the pandemic conditions to occupy archaeological sites and invade them to establish huts and till the land with machinery … they destroy everything they come across,” said Shady.

“One day they called the lawyer who works with us and told him they were going to kill him with me and bury us five meters underground” if the archaeological work continued at the site.

Shady, 74, has spent the last quarter of a century in Caral trying to bring back to life the social history and legacy of the civilization, such as how the construction techniques they used resisted earthquakes.

“These structures up to five thousand years old have remained stable up to the present and structural engineers from Peru and Japan will apply that technology,” said Shady.

The Caral inhabitants understood that they lived in the seismic territory. Their structures had baskets filled with stones at the base that cushioned the movement of the ground and prevented the construction from collapsing. The threats have forced Shady to live in Lima under protection. She was given the Order of Merit by the government last week for services to the nation.

“We’re doing what we can to ensure that neither your health nor your life is at risk due to the effects of the threats you’re receiving,” Peru’s President Francisco Sagasti told her at the ceremony.

Police arrests

Caral was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2009. It spans 66 hectares and is dominated by seven stone pyramids that appear to light up when the sun’s rays fall on them. The civilization is believed to have been peaceful and used neither weapons nor ramparts.

Closed due to the pandemic, Caral reopened to tourists in October and costs just US$3 to visit. During the lockdown, several archaeological pieces were looted in the area and in July police arrested two people for partially destroying a site containing mummies and ceramics.

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

World’s biggest pyramid isn’t in Egypt – it’s hidden under a hill in Mexico

World’s biggest pyramid isn’t in Egypt – it’s hidden under a hill in Mexico

While Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza is by far the most talked-about pyramid in the world, it isn’t the biggest by a long shot. That title goes to the Great Pyramid of Cholula – an ancient Aztec temple in Puebla, Mexico with a base four times larger than Giza’s, and nearly twice the volume.

Why is the world’s biggest pyramid so often overlooked? It could be because that gigantic structure is actually hidden beneath layers of dirt, making it look more like a natural mountain than a place of worship.

In fact, it looks so much like a mountain, that famed Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés completely missed it, and unwittingly built a church right on top of it, as you can see in the image above.

To understand how awesome the Great Pyramid of Cholula is, we must jump back to well before Cortés and his army planted a symbol of Christianity on its peak.

Known as Tlachihualtepetl (meaning “man-made mountain”), the origins of the pyramid are a little sketchy, though the general consensus is that it was built around 300 BC by many different communities to honour the ancient god Quetzalcoatl.

As Zaria Gorvett reports for the BBC, the pyramid was likely constructed with adobe – a type of brick made of out of baked mud – and features six layers built on top of each over many generations. Each time a layer was completed, construction was picked back up by a new group of workers.

This incremental growth is what allowed the Great Pyramid of Cholula to get so big. With a base of 450 by 450 metres (1,480 by 1,480 feet), it’s four times the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

In fact, at roughly 66 metres (217 feet) tall, the pyramid’s total volume is about 4.45 million cubic metres (157 million cubic feet), while the Great Pyramid of Giza’s volume is just 2.5 million cubic metres (88.2 million cubic feet).

World’s biggest pyramid isn’t in Egypt – it’s hidden under a hill in Mexico

The Great Pyramid of Giza is taller, though, at 146 metres (481 feet) high. The ancient Aztecs most likely used the Great Pyramid of Cholula as a place of worship for around 1,000 years before moving to a new, smaller location nearby.

Before it was replaced by newer structures, it was painstakingly decorated in red, black, and yellow insects. But without maintenance, the mud bricks were left to do what mud does in humid climates – provide nutrients to all kinds of tropical greenery.

“It was abandoned sometime in the 7th or 8th Century CE,” archaeologist David Carballo from Boston University told Gorvett at the BBC. “The Choluteca had a newer pyramid-temple located nearby, which the Spaniards destroyed.”

When Cortés and his men arrived in Cholula in October 1519, some 1,800 years after the pyramid was constructed, they massacred around  3,000 people in a single hour – 10 per cent of entire city’s population – and levelled many of their religious structures.

But they never touched the pyramid, because they never found it. In 1594, after settling in the city and claiming it for their own, they built a church – La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Los Remedios (Our Lady of Remedies Church), on top of the hidden pyramid mountain. 

It’s unclear if the Aztecs knew the mud bricks would encourage things to grow all over it and eventually bury the entire structure, but the fact that it looks more like a hill than a pyramid is probably the only reason it still survives today.

And just as well, because according to the BBC, not only is it the world’s largest pyramid, it retains the title of the largest monument ever constructed anywhere on Earth, by any civilisation, to this day.

The pyramid wasn’t discovered until the early 1900s when locals started to build a psychiatric ward nearby. By the 1930s, archaeologists started to uncover it, creating a series of tunnels stretching 8 kilometres (5 miles) in length to give them access.

Now, over 2,300 years after its initial construction, the site has become a tourist destination.

Hopefully, as our ability to study important sites using non-invasive tools continues to improve, archaeologists will gain a better understanding of how the structure was built, by whom, and how it came to look so much like a mountain.  

ANTARCTICA, WORLD

This Alien-Looking Creature Has Survived in Antarctica for at Least 30 Ice Ages

This Alien-Looking Creature Has Survived in Antarctica for at Least 30 Ice Ages

In Antarctica, a team of scientists who have been looking for it for decades have recently rediscovered a small insect-like organism that has survived 30 ice ages.

“This is what we affectionately refer to as the phantom springtail,” says BYU (Brigham Young University) biology professor Byron Adams., who conducts regular research in Antarctica.

“And we call it the phantom springtail because it’s white, like a ghost, but since we hadn’t found it after looking for it for years and years and years, we started to wonder if it was real if it really existed.”

This Alien-Looking Creature Has Survived in Antarctica for at Least 30 Ice Ages
A close-up image of a species of ghost collembola.

In an article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers used the history of small microscopic Antarctic animals to understand exactly how the dynamics of the ice sheet developed over time and how they affected historic ecosystems.

“The evolutionary history of biological organisms can corroborate what we inferred from glaciology and geology about climate change in the past,” Adams said in a statement. “By doing so, we can better predict how life on Earth might respond to these kinds of changes now.”

Researchers have spent the past 20 years collecting samples from six different species of microarthropods at 91 sites in Antarctica. These tiny animals, known as springtails, live on the ground. They have very limited mobility and can only colonize ice-free areas.

During ice ages, ice sheets advance, expanding their coverage of living space, while during warming periods, ice sheets contract and become smaller, leaving more open spaces where ground animals can disperse.

By studying their current locations and patterns of genealogical and evolutionary divergence, Adams and his team can better understand how the West Antarctic ice sheet has changed over time.

The researchers found four species of the creatures, each showing genetically distinct populations in locations likely isolated for millions of years. The other two species were less genetically diverse, although their distribution was restricted.

Together, these patterns give an independent estimate of the timing and magnitude of the ice sheet advance and retreat. Antarctica.

ANTARCTICA, WORLD

Scientists accidentally discover species living in -2°C temperatures under the ice shelf in Antarctica

Scientists accidentally discover species living in -2°C temperatures under the ice shelf in Antarctica

Beneath the Antarctic ice sheets, there is still a lot of living organisms surviving in a very harsh climate, as found in a recent Frontiers in Marine Science report. During an exploratory survey, researchers drilled through 900 meters of ice in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, situated on the southeastern Weddell Sea.

An annotated satellite image of the Filchner-Ronne Ice shelf is the second biggest ice Shelf in Antarctica.

Very few species have ever been observed under these environments at a distance of 260 km from the open ocean, in total darkness and with temperatures of -2.2 ° C.

This research, however, is the first to discover the presence of stationary animals – similar to sponges and potentially several previously unknown species – attached to a boulder on the seafloor.

British Antarctic Survey camera travelling down the 900-meter-long borehole in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf.

“This discovery is one of those fortunate accidents that pushes ideas in a different direction and shows us that Antarctic marine life is incredibly special and amazingly adapted to a frozen world,” says biogeographer and lead author, Dr Huw Griffiths of British Antarctic Survey.

“Our discovery raises so many more questions than it answers, such as how did they get there? What are they eating? How long have they been there? How common are these boulders covered in life? Are these the same species as we see outside the ice shelf or are they new species? And what would happen to these communities if the ice shelf collapsed?”

Floating ice shelves represent the greatest unexplored habitat in the Southern Ocean. They cover more than 1.5m sq km of the Antarctic continental shelf, but only a total area similar in size to a tennis court has been studied through eight prior boreholes.

Current theories on what life could survive under ice shelves suggest that all life becomes less abundant as you move further away from open water and sunlight.

Scientists accidentally discover species living in -2°C temperatures under the ice shelf in Antarctica
The spongelike creatures were attached to a boulder, far under the ice

Past studies have found some small mobile scavengers and predators, such as fish, worms, jellyfish or krill, in these habitats. But filter-feeding organisms – which depend on a supply of food from above – were expected to be amongst the first to disappear further under the ice.

So, it came as a surprise when the team of geologists, drilling through the ice to collect sediment samples, hit a rock instead of mud at the bottom of the ocean below. They were even more surprised by the video footage, which showed a large boulder covered in strange creatures.

Life found beneath Antarctic ice sheet ‘shouldn’t be there’

New Antarctic expedition needed

This is the first-ever record of a hard substrate (ie a boulder) community deep beneath an ice shelf and it appears to go against all previous theories of what types of life could survive there.

Given the water currents in the region, the researchers calculate that this community may be as much as 1,500km upstream from the closest source of photosynthesis.

Other organisms are also known to collect nutrients from glacial melts or chemicals from methane seeps, but the researchers won’t know more about these organisms until they have the tools to collect samples of these organisms–a significant challenge in itself.

“To answer our questions we will have to find a way of getting up close with these animals and their environment – and that’s under 900 meters of ice, 260km away from the ships where our labs are,” continues Griffiths.

“This means that as polar scientists, we are going to have to find new and innovative ways to study them and answer all the new questions we have.”

Griffiths and the team also note that with the climate crisis and the collapse of these ice shelves, time is running out to study and protect these ecosystems.