 This is an incredibly significant finding. We've essentially shown in this research that plants and animals are able to reach Antarctica on their own and we're talking about plants and animals that wouldn't normally be able to travel long distances. Antarctica is biologically isolated but here we found floating kelp washed up on an Antarctic beach that shouldn't be there. It shouldn't be there and it shouldn't have been able to get there. So the kelp that we found is a large species. It can grow up to 12 meters length and it contains many other creatures inside it that have burrowed in and when the kelp breaks off and drifts away across the ocean it carries these communities with it. So you can have diverse invertebrate species, other algae, bryozoa, all sorts of things living inside that kelp holdfast as they drift for thousands of kilometers across the ocean. So in this research we've combined biological data with oceanographic information to try to find out how on earth it was able to reach Antarctic shores. And so we thought it'd be relatively easy for a piece of kelp to get stuck in an eddy and taken southwards towards Antarctica and so we did some modeling to try and test this. So we released four million virtual kelp released from each sub-Antarctic island and much to our surprise we found that actually these kelp couldn't get to Antarctica. We had to include another piece of ocean physics. We had to include the effect of surface waves. So the southern ocean is really stormy and so this makes huge surface waves so 10 to 20 meters high and there's an effect called stoke drift where if you have a particle floating on the surface each time a wave passes the particle will sort of surf a little bit forwards in the direction of the wave and when you include this effect it's actually relatively easy to get particles to Antarctica. This research is essentially the culmination of more than a decade of work on this kelp species. We have samples from throughout where the kelp grows and we now have really powerful genomic tools that allow us to pinpoint exactly where the kelp that we found in Antarctica had come from and our analyses show that it has come from locations that are more than 20,000 kilometers away from where it washed up. One of the reasons this is significant is that the climate is warming and Antarctica has some of the fastest warming regions on the planet. If that's the case we could see a drastic shift in marine ecosystems in Antarctica from these fairly barren ice-scoured rocky shores to something more like what we see in the sub-Antarctic where we have large kelps dominating and those kelps host a wide range of invertebrate animals and other seaweeds.