But this is not recreation in an amusement park. The birds migrate to survive and reproduce. How do they breathe in such air? The fact that they survive on such little oxygen is not much of a revelation....the study was to understand how they migrated over such high mountains for such great distances.. The key finding was that they fly in a ground hugging style in denser air and work updrafts to gain altitude when they can..... There are many sea animals in the world that can stay under water for long periods of time compared to humans, ie whales, seals, turtles, penguins, etc...
Canada geese and I think all geese fly in vee formations to conserve energy and stay together, they change positions constantly so that one does stay in the lead all the time....they use drafting to help conserve energy and they often fly at high altitudes even though they don't have to cross mountains....They flap their wings all the time and don't soar... Also, around here, we see Canada geese all year round...they no longer all migrate south...
Here's one for you........living creatures including fish have been found living under 1/2 mile Antarctic ice in water only about 20-30 feet deep....:
scientificamerican.com
Discovery: Fish Live Beneath Antarctica
Scientists find translucent fish in a wedge of water hidden under 740 meters of ice, 850 kilometers from sunlight
January 21, 2015 |By Douglas Fox
Credit: Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling Project
More In This Article  Scientists Drill through 2,400 Feet of Antarctic Ice for Climate Clues  Strange Life in an Improbable Place  Antarctica: Life on Ice
Stunned researchers in Antarctica have discovered fish and other aquatic animals living in perpetual darkness and cold, beneath a roof of ice 740 meters thick. The animals inhabit a wedge of seawater only 10 meters deep, sealed between the ice above and a barren, rocky seafloor below—a location so remote and hostile the many scientists expected to find nothing but scant microbial life.
A team of ice drillers and scientists made the discovery after lowering a small, custom-built robot down a narrow hole they bored through the Ross Ice Shelf, a slab of glacial ice the size of France that hangs off the coastline of Antarctica and floats on the ocean. The remote water they tapped sits beneath the back corner of the floating shelf, where the shelf meets what would be the shore of Antarctica if all that ice were removed. The spot sits 850 kilometers from the outer edge of the ice shelf, the nearest place where the ocean is in contact with sunlight that allows tiny plankton to grow and sustain a food chain.
“I’m surprised,” says Ross Powell, a 63-year old glacial geologist from Northern Illinois University who co-led the expedition with two other scientists. Powell spoke with me via satellite phone from the remote location on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where 40 scientists, ice drillers and technicians were dropped by ski-mounted planes. “I’ve worked in this area for my whole career,” he says—studying the underbellies where glaciers flow into oceans. “You get the picture of these areas having very little food, being desolate, not supporting much life.” The ecosystem has somehow managed to survive incredibly far from sunlight, the source of energy that drives most life on Earth. The discovery provides insight into what kind of complex but undiscovered life might inhabit the vast areas beneath Antarctica’s ice shelves—comprising more than a million square kilometers of unexplored seafloor.
 The first low-resolution image of a translucent fish that researchers discovered incredibly far beneath Antarctica’s ice reveals two black eyes and various internal organs (colored blobs). Credit: Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling Project The expedition, funded by the National Science Foundation, had ventured to this location to investigate the history and long-term stability of the Whillans Ice Stream, a major glacier that flows off the coast of Antarctica and feeds into the Ross Ice Shelf. The expedition began in December as tractors towed massive sleds holding more than 400 metric tons of fuel and equipment to a remote location 630 kilometers from the South Pole and 1,000 kilometers from the nearest permanent base.
In early January the team began an unprecedented effort to drill through the ice to reach a place called the grounding zone—essentially, a subglacial beach where the glacier transitions from resting on bedrock to floating on sea water as it oozes off the edge of the continent. A team of ice drillers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (U.N.L.) used a jet of hot water from the end of a Kevlar hose a kilometer long and as big around as an ankle to melt a hole through the ice into the seawater below.
Until now no one had ever directly observed the grounding zone of a major Antarctic glacier. And from the moment the hole was first opened on January 7 Pacific time, it appeared that this place didn’t hold much in the way of life.
 Researchers saw 20 to 30 such fishes over several hours, here shown at higher resolution. Two arms of the Deep-SCINI submersible robot that found them are at the top. Credit: Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling Project Deceived by lifeless mud
A downward-facing video camera lowered through the borehole found a barren sea bottom—“rocky, like a lunar surface,” Powell says. Even deep “abyssal” ocean floors three or four kilometers deep in the ocean usually show some signs of animal life: the tracks of crustaceans that have scuttled over the mud, or piles of mud that worms have ejected from their burrows. But the camera showed nothing of the sort. Cores of mud that the team gently plucked from the bottom also showed no signs that anything had ever burrowed through underneath. And seawater lifted from the bottom in bottles was found to be crystal clear—suggesting that the water was only sparsely populated with microbes, and certainly not enough of them for animals to graze and sustain themselves on.
“The water’s so clear—there’s just not much food,” says Trista Vick-Majors, on a separate satellite call. Vick-Majors is a PhD microbiology student from Montana State University, who handled samples of water lifted from the bottom. What’s more, sediments in the sea floor were packed with quartz, a mineral that holds little nutritional value for microbes. When mud is raised from the bottom of an ocean or lake, it is often possible to smell gases such as hydrogen sulfide that are produced by microbes—“your nose is a great detector of microbial activity,” says Alex Michaud, a microbiology PhD student also from Montana State who is working with the sediment samples. “But I don’t smell anything.”
The revelation that something larger lived down there in the dark came eight days after the hole was opened, on January 15 Pacific time.
The finding depended on a skinny, 1.5 meter-long robot called Deep-SCINI, with eyes made of reinforced, pressure-resistant sapphire crystal and a streamlined body of aluminum rods and high-tech, “syntactic” foam comprising millions of tiny, hollow glass beads.
Deep-SCINI, a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), is designed to slip down a narrow, icy borehole and explore the water cavity below. It carries sapphire-shielded cameras, a grabber arm, water-samplers and other instruments. Robert Zook and Justin Burnett, from the U.N.L. ice-drilling program, had worked day and night to finish building it in time for the expedition, flying to New Zealand and then Antarctica with it in their carry-on cases. |
