There’s one unique place on our planet where there are no hordes of tourists, no traffic
jams, and no high-rise buildings.
This place is one of the hardest to reach, and it's almost impossible to survive there
if you're unprepared.
Right, I'm talking about: my back yard.
Crazy.
Oh yeah, and also there’s Antarctica, the home of bizarre findings and even more mysterious
phenomena.
One of them is the deafening roar that's heard from the frozen terrain every night, accompanied
by enigmatic ice quakes.
Something very strange happens in the coldest place on Earth, and this something makes the
frozen valleys of Antarctica shake up to several hundred times a night!
But while this experience might terrify even the most experienced observer, all the strangeness
has a perfectly scientific explanation.
Recently, researchers from the University of Chicago have been studying the coldest
continent with the help of a vast network of seismometers, spread all over the Antarctic
ice sheet.
That's when they first observed a curious thing: every night, the ice "came alive,"
causing thousands of tiny, one-second-long ice quakes.
These ice quakes happened even in the most remote locations, where there hadn't been
any seismic activity before!
It puzzled the scientists to no end: after all, while ice quakes weren't something out
of the ordinary, the fact that they happened at night was anomalous, which here means:
deviating from what is standard, normal or accepted.
Another addition to your growing vocabulary courtesy of the Bright Side!
But eventually, the researchers found the answer to this enigma.
And just like many other worrying natural processes nowadays, the nightly ice quakes
seem to relate to the recent climate changes; in particular, with melting polar ice caps.
Warmer temperatures leave us with ponds of melted water with a layer of ice on top.
When it gets colder at night, the ice layer contracts, and the water underneath this ice
starts to freeze.
As a result of this process, the volume of the water becomes bigger.
The pressure accumulates until, at one moment - wham-bam! - the ice cover breaks with a
loud snap, and there it is - a tiny ice quake!
This process would resemble a volcano eruption but for the small scale, and ice instead of
lava.
Scientists think that the ice quakes that keep shaking glaciers are yet another example
of how much stress our planet experiences because of the changing climate.
But if you’re still not convinced, how about this?
In 2014, scientists who were monitoring the Ross Ice Shelf in West Antarctica recorded
a bloodcurdling acoustic oddity.
With the help of super-sensitive seismic sensors, (and all those “s” sound strung together
are called alliteration”.
Oops off the tracks again…) anyway, they managed to capture a soundscape that could
belong to any haunted movie soundtrack.
This spooky melody was just a reflection of how Antarctica's ice was changing under the
influence of global warming.
The sound was coming from seismic waves that were rippling through the ice shelf.
The top several feet of loose ice and snow, called firn, are extremely vulnerable to what's
happening on the surface, be it changes in temperature or wind direction.
For example, the researchers noticed that the "ice tune" was different after storms
blew through.
But every time afterward, the melody returned to normal.
That is, until a warm spell hit in January 2016.
That's when the pitch of the "ice tune" dropped.
The reason for that was the melting of top layers of ice and snow, which slowed down
seismic waves coming through the firn.
But that wasn't the worst about the unusually warm January weather.
Researchers were shocked to find out that even after the temperatures had returned to
the average January norm (and we can only guess that this norm is nothing short of freezing!),
the pitch of the tune didn't become higher again!
It could mean only one thing: the changes in the firn were permanent, or at least semi-permanent.
Is it a big deal?
I'm afraid so.
When the firn melts, it not only makes the ice shelf unstable, but also speeds up the
streaming of ice into the ocean.
This problem is especially acute in West Antarctica, where warm ocean currents undercut floating
ice shelves.
If the worst happens, this region can cause sea levels to rise by more than 10 feet!
So, even without the accompanying horror movie soundtrack, the processes occurring in Antarctica
are already frightening enough.
However, ice quakes and mysterious tunes aren't the only puzzles scientists have managed to
crack.
It started in the early 1970s, when satellites were just beginning to take photos of Earth.
In one of the images, researchers spotted a huge enigmatic hole piercing one of the
seasonal ice packs, floating in the Lazarev Sea in Antarctica.
When summer came, the gap disappeared, leaving more questions than answers... only to reappear
almost half a century later, in 2017.
Then, in winter, when ice is supposed to be at its thickest, a monstrous 3,700-square-mile
hole unexpectedly showed up in the very same ice pack!
And as if that wasn’t enough, just two months after that, the gap grew a staggering 740
percent larger.
When it got warmer, the hole vanished without a trace, once again.
But this time, scientists had an idea of what this phenomenon might be.
It turned out that such short-lasting gaps could be scars left by cyclonic storms!
And indeed, in September 2017, cold and warm air masses collided over the South Pole.
It caused powerful winds, swirling inward and reaching a speed of 72 miles per hour,
as well as towering, 52-ft-tall waves.
These forces tossed the ice pack around, eventually creating a bizarre-looking hole.
But scientists are sure that despite how threatening and dramatic such a gap may look, it often
plays a crucial role for wildlife survival.
Connecting the ocean and the sky, it creates a habitat for phytoplankton and convenient
pathways for animals, like penguins and seals.
On the other hand, huge gaps in ice packs indicate climate changes AND can influence
the climate themselves, not only regionally, but globally as well.
For one, they change the ocean’s movements.
What's more, they create so-to-say windows through which tons of energy leak from the
ocean into the atmosphere, adding to global warming.
And that's the most disturbing thing about ice pack gaps.
The warmer the climate on Earth becomes, the more cyclones rage at the Earth's poles.
And therefore, more and more climate-changing gaps appear in ice packs.
Looks like a vicious cycle to me...
This problem becomes even more urgent as soon as you get to know that under Antarctica's
icy cover, there are sources of incredible heat!
The thing is that, in particular areas, the crust both under East Antarctica and West
Antarctica isn't thick enough to protect ice sheets from the heat of the magma which is
bubbling below the surface.
No one knows why the underground heat is especially intense in such "hotspots," but it's a fact
that this heat can lead to the warming of the ocean and melting of ice.
By the way, a 25-year-long survey has also shown that nowadays, Antarctica's ice is disappearing
at an alarming speed.
During more than 2 decades, the continent has lost a whopping 3 trillion tons of ice!
Approximately one-third of this ice vanished in July 2017, when a monstrosity of an iceberg,
with an area of 2,000 square miles, broke off from the Larsen C ice shelf.
It weighed more than 1 trillion tons and was the most massive iceberg ever recorded.
The rest of the ice has been steadily melting and flowing into the ocean, and this process
has been accelerating over the past several years.
In any case, not all the mysteries of Antarctica have been solved yet.
For example, scientists still can't explain the origin of high-energy particles, literally
streaming from the continent's ice!
These particles keep shooting up from the ground and head away into open space.
However, there’s a theory that could probably explain this phenomenon: some researchers
are sure that the particles are cosmic rays that come from space, blast through our planet,
and come out from the other side.
Now, this idea has one serious drawback: the cosmic particles people know about shouldn't
be able to pass through Earth without crashing into something and disintegrating.
That's why the unusual behavior of Antarctica's particles has remained unexplained so far.
How about you?
Would you like to travel to Antarctica, solve some of its enigmas, and maybe meet a penquin?
If so, let me know down in the comments!
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and share it with a friend.
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