See that? It’s a shrimp. Swimming in a hole. Under 600 feet of ice. Twelve miles from the ocean. NASA scientists found it in Western Antarctica, and they’re totally freaking out about it.

The shrimp is a complete surprise. Scientists didn’t expect to find anything more than bacteria that deep in the ice. Instead, they found not one, but two three-inch-long shrimp. From the AP:

“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 meeting Wednesday. “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. Technically, it’s not a shrimp. It’s a Lyssianasid amphipod, which is distantly related to shrimp.

It’s in incredible discovery, and it immediately got everybody thinking about the possibility of life in other hostile habitats. If a complex animal like a shrimp can survive under 600 feet of ice, there might be life  on Europa, Jupiter’s big frozen moon. Or on other planets in other solar systems.

The scientists have no idea how the shrimp is able to survive, yet. They plan to study the animal and its ecosystem to see what it eats and how ekes out a living. They have a lot of ground to cover. The Antarctic ice sheet is 14 million square kilometers and contains 30 million cubic kilometers of ice. It holds 60 percent of the earth’s fresh water.

Link to AP article

Decades of planning and research culminated in triumphant ecstasy today when NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander plunged its trembly multi-million-dollar armature into the soft, powdery Martian soil near its landing site. Then, in a display of sublime surrealism, Phoenix promptly dumped its prize back onto the ground.

NASA calls it a practice scoop, a maneuver to test Phoenix’s delicate digging arm before it begins testing soil samples with its onboard geological laboratory. All systems appear to be go, so further testing will continue. 

The scoop did reveal more shimmering material (Phoenix photographed a shimmering patch of what could be ice directly below its landing gear earlier this week) that could be ice or salt, NASA officials say.

Link to New Scientist article.

Link to Science Daily article.