2 days ago
Scientists make jaw-dropping discovery after satellite images reveal what's hiding over a mile beneath Antarctic ice: 'It's like uncovering a time capsule'
Scientists studying the East Antarctic Ice Sheet discovered a 34-million-year-old river-carved landscape hidden under more than a mile of ice, The Brighter Side of News reported. The concealed world offered a unique glimpse into the history and potential future of the critical ice sheet.
"It's like uncovering a time capsule," said Stewart Jamieson of Durham University, the study's lead author, per The Brighter Side of News.
The preserved landscape, which existed before the formation of the Antarctic sheet ice, spanned nearly 4 million square miles, providing experts with an unprecedented view into the region's geological history. The team used RADARSAT, a Canadian satellite system, to detect the landscape beneath the ice, per The Brighter Side of News.
By studying the preserved landscape, researchers can better understand previous cycles of freezing and melting that can be crucial to predicting how future Antarctic ice melt will unfold.
Because the Antarctic ice sheets sit on land rather than floating in water like Arctic ice, their melting would have a dramatic impact on sea levels around the world.
According to the University of Texas Institute of Geophysics, the basin where the researchers discovered the hidden landscape contained enough ice to raise sea levels by a catastrophic 25 feet or more. Still, the land under the surface of that crucial ice sheet remained more mysterious to researchers than the surface of Mars.
"And that's a problem because the landscape controls the way that ice in Antarctica flows, and it controls the way it might respond to past, present, and future climate change," Jamieson told UTIG.
Researchers expressed hope that the discovery will lead to similar findings in other regions.
"This landscape hanging out there in the middle of the basin is a little bit of an odd phenomenon," said Duncan Young, a research scientist for UTIG. "We're now working to answer why it was preserved and use that knowledge to find others."
Combined, the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland contain two-thirds of Earth's fresh water, and they are melting at an astounding rate, according to NASA. The Antarctic ice sheet alone is shedding a jaw-dropping 150 billion tons of ice every single year.
While studying the potential future impacts of rising global temperatures is important, it is just as important to prevent planet-warming pollution from entering the atmosphere in the first place.
By taking steps like installing solar on your home, switching to an electric vehicle, or growing your own food in a home garden, you can do your part to help limit increasing global temperatures and sea-level rises.
While these might seem like small things to do in the face of such a momentous challenge, if we multiply those actions by millions or even billions of people, we can make a real difference.
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