30-million-year-old lost world beneath Antarctic ice discovered: ‘Like opening a time capsule'
Antarctica wasn't always a desolate icescape. International researchers announced the discovery of an over 30-million-year-old lost world beneath the Antarctic ice that may have teemed with rivers, forests, and possibly even palm trees.
'This finding is like opening a time capsule,' said Professor Stewart Jamieson, a geologist from Durham University in England and co-author of the groundbreaking study, which was published in the journal 'Nature Communications,' per The Economic Times.
Field work for the ice-breaking study began in 2017, when the team was drilling in a seabed to extract sediments from an ecosystem buried beneath the ice, the Jerusalem Post reported.
3 'The land underneath the East Antarctic ice sheet is less well-known than the surface of Mars,' said study co-author Professor Stewart Jamieson.
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Upon analyzing this sediment, they happened upon an ancient ecosystem buried over a mile underneath the ice.
Researchers estimated that the total landscape, located in Wilkesland, East Antarctica, measured more than 12,000 square miles — approximately the size of Maryland, the Daily Mail reported.
3 Researchers found traces of ancient palm pollen, suggesting that the region could've even been tropical before its glaciation.
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'The land underneath the East Antarctic ice sheet is less well-known than the surface of Mars,' said Jamieson. 'We're investigating a small part of that landscape in more detail to see what it can tell us about the evolution of the landscape and the evolution of the ice sheet.'
Using advanced tools such as ground-penetrating radar, the team was able to pinpoint blocks of elevated ground measuring 75 and 105 miles long and up to 53 miles wide, that were separated by valleys as wide as 25 miles and plunging nearly 3,900 feet deep.
Further analysis revealed that this subglacial landmass was 'likely not eroded by the ice sheet' and was likely 'created by rivers,' per Jamieson.
This would mean that the prehistoric landscape likely formed before the first large-scale glaciation of Antarctica 34 million years ago.
3 A diagram depicting the ancient river landscape preserved beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Nature Communications
When supercontinent Gondwana began to fragment, the shifting landmass created deep fissures and gave rise to the aforementioned towering ridges.
During this time, the region likely featured flowing rivers and dense forests in a temperate or even tropical climate — a theory supported by the team's discovery of ancient palm pollen near the site, the Economic Times reported.
Meanwhile, the sediments found at the repository contained microorganisms, harking back to a totally different environment with warmer seas and greater biodiversity.
'It's difficult to say exactly what this ancient landscape looked like, but depending on how far back you go, the climate might have resembled modern-day Patagonia, or even something tropical,' said Jamieson.
In other words, the greening of Antarctica is not necessarily a modern phenomeon.
As the global climate cooled, the incoming ice sheet covered the continent and halted the erosion process, effectively freezing the subglacial ecosystem in time — much like an ice block woolly mammoth.
'The geological history of Antarctica records significant fluctuations,' explained Jamieson. 'But such abrupt changes gave the ice little time to significantly alter the landscape beneath.'
Despite subsequent warm spells, such as the mid-Pliocene around 3 million years ago, the regions icy carapace never receded enough to expose this subglacial topography.
The team hopes that analyzing the structure and evolution of the hidden landscape — namely how it was shaped by prehistoric ice — will help experts more accurately predict melting patterns today.
'This type of finding helps us understand how climate and geography intertwine, and what we can expect in a world with rising temperatures,' said Jamieson.
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IceCube is a million times larger than the next neutrino experiment that we have built in the laboratory. It's just huge. Since the interaction rate depends on how many things you're surveying, the larger the volume, the more likely you are to see something. For ultra-high-energy neutrinos [which originate in space], you're always thinking about natural environments—mountains, glaciers, lakes—landscapes converted into experiments. Gizmodo: Antarctica isn't exactly somewhere you can just fly to with a plane ticket. What challenges come from the unique conditions at this remote location? Argüelles-Delgado: You're right. The logistics are very complicated. You have to ship all of these components, and you have to be sure that when you put something in the ice, it will work. It's like when you put something on a satellite on a spaceship. Once it's there, you cannot fix it. It is just there. So the quality requirements are very high, and there are multiple challenges. One of them is drilling the actual holes, through two steps. A mechanical drill makes the first guiding hole. Then we use a custom-made, high-pressure hot water drill that then pumps water to [carve the glacier]. The other part is the cable. The cables in IceCubes are quite special, [holding] the instruments that digitalize the modules, which allows you to have better quality of signal processing. Gizmodo: What are the upcoming upgrades to IceCube, and why are they needed? Argüelles-Delgado: The upgrade has two functions. One of them is that we need to better understand the glacier where IceCube is embedded. Obviously, we didn't make that glacier. We just put things on the glacier. And the better we understand the glacier and its optical properties—how light travels in that glacier—the better we can actually do neutrino physics. So we're going to install a bunch of cameras and light sources to try to sort of survey the glacier better. We're also installing a bunch of new sensors [for] a larger version of IceCube, called IceCube-Gen2. When you do science, you want to test new things but also measure things. We are not going to be able to extend the detector volume, but instead we're going to put [sensors] in the innermost part of the detector to allow us to better measure lower-energy neutrinos in IceCube. Low-energy neutrinos are important because at low energies, the neutrinos experience something known as flavor oscillation, which means that the neutrinos, as they travel from one side of the planet to the other, change in type. That is actually a quantum mechanical phenomenon of microscopic scales. IceCube shows one of the best measurements of that physics. Gizmodo: You've been a part of IceCube's journey since the beginning. In your view, what are some of the main highlights the experiment has accomplished? Argüelles-Delgado: First, we discovered that there are ultra-high-energy neutrinos in the universe. These are difficult to detect but not that rare in terms of the universe's energy density, or how much energy per unit volume exists in the universe between protons, neutrinos, and light—they're actually very similar—and IceCube established [this relationship]. A few years ago we saw the first photo of our galaxy in neutrinos. Something very close to my heart is flavor conversion in quantum mechanics. We think neutrinos are produced primarily as electron- and muon-type neutrinos. Now as they travel through space, because of these quantum mechanical effects, they can transform into tau neutrinos, which are not initially there at production. In IceCube, we have found significant evidence of various tau neutrinos at high energy levels. What's amazing about this is that those neutrinos can only be produced and can get to us if quantum mechanics is operating at these extremely long distances. Gizmodo: Given these highlights, what are some things that you are most looking forward to next? Argüelles-Delgado: There are two things that I find very exciting in neutrino astrophysics. One is the neutrinos' quantum behavior, and we do not understand how they acquire their masses. Most particles, when they have mass, have two states that interact with the Higgs boson to produce their masses. Neutrinos, for some reason, we only see one of these states. What I'm excited about is looking for new flavor transformations of very high-energy neutrinos. In some of these scenarios, we could actually have some idea about neutrino mass mechanisms. The second thing is, we have seen neutrinos that are 1,000 times more energetic than the product of the LHC [particle beam]. So are there more at the higher end of neutrinos? Is this where the story ends? What's interesting is that an experiment called KM3NeT in the Mediterranean has reported observations of a neutrino that's [100,000] times more energetic than the LHC beams. I think that is weird. You know, when you see weird things happening, it often means you don't understand something. And so we need to understand that puzzle. Gizmodo: On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely is it that we'll solve these mysteries? Argüelles-Delgado: If we discover the nature of neutrino masses is due to this quantum oscillation phenomenon of the high energies, this will be like a Nobel Prize discovery. Because it's such a big thing, I'll give you at best 1%. Gizmodo: I'd say that's actually pretty good. Argüelles-Delgado: I'd say that's pretty good, yeah. Let's say 1%. I think we'll solve the puzzle of the ultra-high-energy regime; that's a matter of time. That's going to take us easily another 15 years, but it's going to be, again, completely new land. We will see what awaits us. When IceCube started seeing the first neutrinos, we were so confused because we were not expecting to see them [like] this, right? And if all the confusion keeps happening, we'll find more interesting results
