2021
February
17
Wednesday

Monitor Daily Podcast

February 17, 2021
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Organic life needs food. It needs light and heat. 

Or does it? 

Geologists were stunned to discover life at the bottom of a 2,900-foot-deep hole in the Antarctic ice shelf. They were drilling for mud samples on the ocean floor but hit a rock. When they dropped a camera into this dark ice hole, they saw what looked like 16 tiny sea sponges, up to 3.5 inches long, attached to a boulder, and 22 other unidentified creatures.

They shouldn’t be there,” Huw Griffiths at the British Antarctic Survey told New Scientist magazine.  

They shouldn’t be there because there’s no light or known food source. This boulder of life is at least 390 miles from the nearest known meal. It’s a marine desert with no DoorDash. Dr. Griffiths, lead author of the study published Monday in Frontiers in Marine Science, suspects the organisms are filter feeders, perhaps a new species of life, surviving on nutrients carried in the chilly water. But nutrients from where? 

The currents move in the wrong direction to bring food from open waters. Scientists speculate that nutrients might rain down from melting ice above the sponges, or from organic material stirred up in the mud below. They don’t know. 

Life has a way of surprising us. Every now and then, it reminds us of its awesome resilience, its imaginative ability to find a way to thrive in the most inhospitable places – on this planet, and potentially on others.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Patrick Semansky/AP
President Joe Biden departs after Mass at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Catholic Church as snow falls, Feb. 7, 2021, in Wilmington, Delaware. Mr. Biden is the most openly pious president in decades.

The Explainer

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Venezuelan migrant Veronica Hernandez, who is eight months pregnant, holds a sign asking for food or money in Bogota, Colombia, Feb. 9, 2021. Colombia announced it will register hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans currently in the country to give them legal status.

Essay

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A girl holds an American flag as protesters gather for a Black Lives Matter march for racial justice through a residential neighborhood on July 13, 2020, in Valley Stream, New York.

The Monitor's View

AP
Buddhist monks march during a protest against the military coup in Yangon, Myanmar, Feb. 16.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Antonis Nikolopoulos/Eurokinissi/AP
The Acropolis and the traditional Plaka district after a rare heavy snowfall in Athens, Greece, Feb. 17, 2021. The Greek Army has been called in to help, with parts of the capital without power or water for three days.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thanks for joining us. Come back tomorrow: We’re working on a review of the new film “Nomadland,” an artsy, American road trip for the vagabond in all of us.

More issues

2021
February
17
Wednesday
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