The seafloor beneath floating ice shelves accounts roughly a third of the Antarctic’s 5 million km² of continental shelf. Prior to this study, our knowledge of these habitats and the life they support was restricted to what has been observed from eight boreholes drilled for geological and glaciological studies. The established theory of sub-ice shelf biogeography is that both functional and taxonomic diversities decrease along a nutrient gradient with distance from the ice shelf front, resulting in a depauperate fauna, dominated by mobile scavengers and predators toward the grounding line. Mobile macro-benthic life and mega-benthic life have been observed as far as 700 km under an ice shelf. New observations from two boreholes in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf challenge the idea that sessile organisms reduce in prevalence the further under the ice you go. The discovery of an established community consisting of only sessile, probably filter feeding, organisms (sponges and other taxa) on a boulder 260 km from the ice front raises significant questions, especially when the local currents suggest that this community is somewhere between 625 km and 1500 km in the direction of water flow from the nearest region of photosynthesis. This new evidence requires us to rethink our ideas with regard to the diversity of community types found under ice shelves, the key factors which control their distribution and their vulnerability to environmental change and ice shelf collapse.

浮冰架下面的海底约占南极500万平方公里²的三分之一大陆架。在进行这项研究之前，我们对这些生境及其所支持的生活的了解仅限于从为地质学和冰川学钻探的八个钻孔中观察到的内容。已建立的次冰架生物地理学理论是，功能性和分类学多样性都沿着营养梯度随着距冰架前缘的距离而降低，从而导致动物种群减少，以流动的清除剂和掠食性动物为主导的趋向着陆线。在冰架下可观测到远至700 km的大型底栖生物的活动性。在Filchner-Ronne冰架上的两个钻孔中获得的新观测结果挑战了无柄生物在冰层中越深的流行率越低的想法。发现一个仅由无柄，可能是过滤物，距冰面260 km的巨石上的生物（海绵和其他类群）引起了重大问题，尤其是当当地潮流表明该群落在最近的水流方向上位于625 km至1500 km之间时光合作用的区域。这一新证据要求我们重新思考关于冰架下发现的社区类型的多样性，控制其分布及其对环境变化和冰架坍塌的脆弱性的关键因素的想法。