What if you lost the roof over your head? It'd probably be a pretty significant change in your lifestyle.
If you were an organism living on the bottom of the sea under the massive Larsen Ice Shelf of Antarctica, this would be more than a rhetorical question.
Duke Graduate Student David Honig is on a ship just off the ice shelf right now with a team that is exploring those questions.
All sorts of critters have lived in the lightless environment below the shelf for millennia, if not eons, making their living on energy sources other than sunlight, namely methane that seeps from the ocean floor. But the Larsen shelf is breaking apart and calving like crazy, exposing huge new areas of this delicate ecosystem to sunlight for the first time in a very long time.
What happens next?
Tune in to the Deep Sea News blog and follow along with David for the next two months as the team tries to find out.
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