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.