During an expedition to search for a famed shipwreck, researchers discovered something unexpected: striking geometric patterns on the floor of Antarctica’s western Weddell Sea created by fish.
The seafloor had once been obscured beneath a thick ice shelf, but that changed in July 2017 when the massive A68 iceberg calved from the Larsen C Ice Shelf. The iceberg measured 2,239 square miles (5,800 square kilometers) — about the size of Delaware.
Seizing an opportunity to study the previously hidden seafloor, researchers organized the Weddell Sea Expedition 2019 with two goals in mind: exploring the biology of the western Weddell Sea and searching for the wreckage of the HMS Endurance, which became trapped and ultimately ripped apart by ice in 1915.
Researchers set sail in January 2019 for a 49-day expedition aboard the South African polar research vessel SA Agulhas II. Ironically, the expedition experienced extreme sea ice conditions similar to what Endurance faced more than a century earlier, preventing the team from conducting a search for the wreck.
“The sea ice in particular was a challenge as at the time there was a bottleneck and a build of sea ice around that area — we were heading directly towards this, playing chicken with icebergs as we went,” said Dr. Michelle Taylor, senior lecturer in the School of Life Sciences at the UK’s University of Essex. Taylor is the coauthor of a new study published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers about what the expedition uncovered.
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