Scientists have uncovered unprecedented shapes beneath a floating Antarctic iceberg during an expedition aimed at capturing the most detailed images of a glacier’s underside—a crucial mission for understanding rising ocean levels, reports The New York Times.
Images captured by an underwater robot contain clues about how ice shelves thin and have revealed never-before-seen ice formations, such as immense terraces with rounded, twisted edges and teardrop-shaped protrusions.
Some of these structures span hundreds of meters and appear to have been sculpted by turbulent ocean currents. Researchers described the formations as “enigmatic.”
“I couldn’t take my eyes off them,” said Anna Wahlin, an oceanographer at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.”I had no idea they could look like this.”
The findings were published in the journal Science Advances.
The interest in these formations extends beyond their beauty: ice shelves are the floating edges of glaciers and are critical to sea level rise.
Ice caps block glaciers from sliding into the ocean. As the water beneath the ice gets warmer, the floes melt and loosen, causing the ice to slide even faster into the ocean.
The new images come from beneath the Dotson Ice Shelf, which is in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica. Dotson is more stable than other ice floes in the region. Wahlin and her colleagues initially tried to probe the bottom of the nearby, rapidly shrinking Thwaites Glacier.
Scientists estimate that the total collapse of Thwaites Glacier will raise global ocean water levels by more than half a meter over the next few centuries.
“To understand the Antarctic ice cycle and how ice gets from the continent to the ocean, we need to understand how it melts underneath, a process that is just as important” as the process by which land ice reaches the ocean (sail ), according to Wahlin.
Previous studies have shown that if ocean water continues to warm, the collapse of the Dotson Ice Shelf will be inevitable, according to Live Science.
Researchers believe that the strange shapes discovered under the ice sheet are created by the uneven melting of the ice as water moves with the Earth’s rotation on the underside of the glacier.
“It takes a lot of energy to melt ice, so all the ice in Antarctica is like a huge temperature stabilizer and an important part of Earth’s climate system,” Wahlin said.
“If the Antarctic ice sheet were to reach the ocean at an increased rate, it could influence sea level rise, so if we know what the lower and upper limits are, we can also limit future sea level rise.”