Researchers aboard German research icebreaker Polarstern in February 2021 made an unexpected discovery: the world’s largest icefish nesting ground, located 500 meters (1,650 feet) under the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica. While imaging ocean floor topography using the vessel’s towed video camera sled system, graduate student Lilian Böhringer upon sighting the vast, incredible icefish nesting “metropole” contacted the bridge where Autun Purser, of the Alfred Wegener Institute, was stationed. This Antarctic region, known as the Filchner Trough, was of particular interest to the team because of its enigmatic inflow of slightly warmer, topographically guided bottom waters, up to two degrees Celsius warmer than surrounding bottom waters. Such underwater troughs often act as conduits for upflows to the Weddell Shelf, and this one flowed directly over a vast breeding colony unlike anything that had been seen before. It was here that they found the ocean pockmarked with thousands of …
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