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Earth Science

Scientists Are Uncovering Ominous Waters Under Antarctic Ice (wired.com) 37

A super-pressurized, 290-mile-long river is running under the ice sheet. That could be bad news for sea-level rise. From a report: For all its treacherousness and general inclination to kill you, Antarctica's icy surface is fairly tranquil: vast stretches of miles-thick whiteness, with not a plant or animal to speak of. But way below the surface, where that ice meets land, things get wild. What scientists used to think was a ho-hum subglacial environment is in fact humming with hydrological activity, recent research is revealing, with major implications for global sea-level rise. Researchers just found that, at the base of Antarctica's ice, an area the size of Germany and France combined is feeding meltwater into a super-pressurized, 290-mile-long river running to the sea. "Thirty years ago, we thought the whole of the ice pretty much was frozen to the bed," says Imperial College London glaciologist Martin Siegert, coauthor of a new paper in Nature Geoscience describing the finding. "Now we're in a position that we've just never been in before, to understand the whole of the Antarctic ice sheet."

Antarctica's ice is divided into two main components: the ice sheet that sits on land, and the ice shelf that extends off the coast, floating on seawater. Where the two meet -- where the ice lifts off the bed and starts touching the ocean -- is known as the grounding line. But the underside of all that ice is obscured. To find out what's going on below, some scientists have hiked across glaciers while dragging ground-penetrating radar units on sleds -- the pings travel through thousands of feet of ice and bounce off the underlying seawater, so the researchers can build detailed maps of what used to be hidden. Others are setting off explosions, then analyzing the seismic waves that come back to the surface to indicate whether there's land or water below. Still others are lowering torpedo-shaped robots through boreholes to get unprecedented imagery of the underside of the floating ice shelf. Up in the sky, satellites can measure minute changes in surface elevation, which indicates the features below -- a swell, for instance, might betray a subglacial lake.

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Scientists Are Uncovering Ominous Waters Under Antarctic Ice

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  • by WallyL ( 4154209 ) on Thursday November 17, 2022 @02:03PM (#63058732)
    Alright everybody, chill!
  • Omnious Man (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Thursday November 17, 2022 @02:20PM (#63058776) Journal

    Before deciding it is ominous, shouldn't there be measurements of change? It sounds like they just discovered this even exists

    • It's pretty obvious why it's ominous if you RTFA. Specifically, the water beneath the ice can act as a lubricant, so the ice can flow much more quickly than they formerly believed.

      • Re: Omnious Man (Score:3, Interesting)

        Which only proves that they didn't know about it before. Not that anything new is going on.
        • Lake Vostok has been a thing for a while.
        • by haruchai ( 17472 )

          Which only proves that they didn't know about it before. Not that anything new is going on.

          They've known something similar was happening in Greenland & that in some places surface meltwater was cutting through the sheet down to the base

      • Re:Omnious Man (Score:5, Interesting)

        by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Thursday November 17, 2022 @03:04PM (#63058916) Journal

        It's pretty obvious why it's ominous if you RTFA. Specifically, the water beneath the ice can act as a lubricant, so the ice can flow much more quickly than they formerly believed.

        The summary states that they've based their thinking on the assumption that it was frozen from surface to bottom. Now, for the first time they've discovered that isn't true.

        So perhaps their model needs to be re-thought. And people are skeptical because of the seemingly constant pattern:

        *Discovers environment does something they didn't previously know* : "Holy Shit, it's Doom!"
        *Discovers environment doesn't do something they previously assumed* : "Holy Shit, it's Doom!"

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

          So perhaps their model needs to be re-thought.

          This is not good news. It means things are worse than they thought. Hence the word "ominous" in the title. What a bag of illiterates.

          And people are skeptical because of the seemingly constant pattern:

          People are skeptical because they think they know more than the experts because everybody's gone all Dunning-Krueger these days, apparently. They don't even know what they don't know, which is why they think they know something. A quick google search would let them know they don't know shit, but if they did the research they would know that and they're allergic to admitting th

        • by HiThere ( 15173 ) <charleshixsn@earthlinkLION.net minus cat> on Thursday November 17, 2022 @04:12PM (#63059152)

          Well, the response you're quote is headline writers trying to get hits.

          OTOH, there is significant evidence that a very large ice sheet will break up as soon as within the current decade. But people don't read that and get a thrill, even though they should. (And it might take a couple of decades. But that's still REALLY short term when talking about climate change.)

          This is another factor fitting into the models for "what will happen when the ice sheets blocking the glaciers sliding into the sea break up?" Prior predictions were based on the glaciers having a lot of friction against the underlying rock, and so moving rather slowly. This indicates that there might not be all that much friction, and it might move fast. (Do note that "might*.)

          So what this COULD mean is a MUCH more rapid increase in the rise of sea levels than the current predictions (which are *known* to be conservative). But it might not. It will need to be fed into the models to figure out what the most probable results are. But the movement is still blocked until the ice sheets acting as brakes collapse.

          So don't expect this to matter until sometime later in the decade, and perhaps sometime in the next decade.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          You deniers sure are stupid.

          Discovers the environment does something worse than predicted.

          It's not just different you numpty, it's worse.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by quantaman ( 517394 )

      Before deciding it is ominous, shouldn't there be measurements of change? It sounds like they just discovered this even exists

      A new discovery suggesting that something you previously thought was very stable is actually not that stable and may cause a huge disaster?

      That's pretty much the dictionary definition of ominous [merriam-webster.com].

      • Re:Omnious Man (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 ) on Thursday November 17, 2022 @03:21PM (#63058990)

        Before deciding it is ominous, shouldn't there be measurements of change? It sounds like they just discovered this even exists

        A new discovery suggesting that something you previously thought was very stable is actually not that stable and may cause a huge disaster?

        That's pretty much the dictionary definition of ominous [merriam-webster.com].

        Also quite possible what they previously thought was very stable never really was. That is ominous too, just for an entirely different reason.

  • I'd wager extra Shoggoth activity leads to the creation of this river!

    Maybe the ancient ones are about to come/wake again!

  • Don't Eat It. First rule when getting to the artic. Mostly europeens down there to begin with, so any wall is fair game.

  • It's a good 70 feet above ocean level though. I'm not stupid.

  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Thursday November 17, 2022 @03:01PM (#63058902)

    Pressurized water!

    Never seen on this planet or on any other!

    Physics was wrong!

  • I have to wonder if the ice melting and the weight coming off the crust is allowing magma to come up and heat further into the crust causing faster melting?
    It really seems like between the thawing of the arctic region with its methane escape and now this, we have started a cycle that really will not be stopped regardless of what we do.
  • It scares me the first time I read the title of the article. I am getting help now with my college studies from expert researchers and writers of free essay samples about topics that reveal what threatens our ecology. https://samploon.com/ [samploon.com] helps me realize that many actions of society change the climate and cause some anomalies. However, humans are not always to blame. So all that's left for us to do is watch what happens to the ominous water we discover.
  • Since he caught all the monsters in all of the known rivers maybe there's something down there he hasn't caught yet.
  • Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

  • The sky is falling. Everyone stop driving.

"Pok pok pok, P'kok!" -- Superchicken

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