What is hidden under the glaciers of Antarctica?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the minds of the majority, Antarctica is an uninhabited continent, where there is nothing but animals, a huge amount of ice and snow, and a few scientific stations with seconded employees. In fact, Antarctica is much more complex than it might seem at first glance.

Under the ice of the fifth largest continent of the Earth, for example, more than 400 lakes have been discovered, but scientists have reached only four of them. It is noteworthy that Russian scientists were the first to reach the lakes near Antarctica - in 2012, water samples from Lake Vostok were obtained. They found three bacteria characteristic specifically for this reservoir. Now microbiologists and geneticists do not lose hope of discovering other forms of life in the subglacial Antarctic lake, which were not previously known to science. Like, for example, bacteria WPS-2 and AD3 - they live in the soil with other organisms and do not need either solar or geothermal energy. With a very meager supply of nutrients, they literally switched to an "air diet", which was a discovery for scientists.

But ice discoveries in Antarctica are not limited to lakes. Not so long ago, scientists discovered under the Thwaites Glacier a giant cavity with an area of about 40 square kilometers and a height of about 300 meters, which was formed by the melting of about 14 billion tons of ice. For specialists, this is a wake-up call for a number of reasons. First, most of this ice has melted over the past three years. Secondly, such cavities significantly reduce the strength of icebergs. And this is fraught with the acceleration of their destruction and the rise in the level of the world ocean.

However, not all cavities under the ice are formed due to the melting of ice. The researchers also found craters, which, on the contrary, are filled with water, creating new sub-ice lakes. Their distinctive feature is only that they are not isolated from the world's oceans, and therefore can hardly be a habitat for life forms hitherto unknown to science, and from the point of view of discoveries they are not so interesting for researchers.

In addition to lakes and cavities in Antarctica, there are active volcanoes (and a total of 91 volcanoes were found on the continent) - for example, Mount Erebus on Ross Island, which, due to its volcanic activity, has created a fairly developed network of sub-ice caves. In these "caches" melted in ice by volcanic steam, scientists discovered several DNA sequences that did not correspond to any known organisms. This means that in these caves there may be species of plants or animals still unknown to science. Moreover, the researchers are very optimistic and do not exclude the possibility of finding even unique ecosystems, and not just individual organisms.

Another mystery that the continent has thrown to scientists is the mysterious tremors that shake Antarctica every night. However, the secret did not last long. Having studied the unusual phenomenon, the researchers came to the conclusion that the ice surface is capable of creating small earthquakes, or rather even icequakes. The tremors recorded by seismographs allowed scientists to determine that in this way the melting of ice and the surface movements caused by it manifest themselves.

I must say that the above discoveries are only a small part of what scientists have learned about Antarctica in recent years. And one can only guess how many more secrets this mysterious continent keeps under its ice.