ANTARCTICA: The southern continent hasn’t seen a tree for 30 million years, so one would expect that shipworms, which consume submerged wood in most of the world’s oceans, wouldn’t migrate into these frigid waters. To confirm this and to determine whether historical shipwrecks such as Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance (crushed and sunk by pack ice in 1915) and others survive intact, scientists submerged samples of oak and pine for 14 months. The wood was recovered in pristine condition, though whalebone submerged alongside it was infested with unrelated bone-eating worms. —Samir S. Patel