An international team of scientists has confirmed the existence of groundwater in Antarcticasomething that was suspected but, until now, had not been proven, according to the study published Thursday by the journal Science.
The research provides information about the sediments under the Antarctic ice, an inaccessible part that has not been explored and that will help scientists to better understand how the frozen continent works, and how it changes in response to climate.
“Ice streams are important because they funnel about 90% of Antarctica’s ice from the interior to the margins,” explained study lead author Chloe Gustafson of the University of California, San Diego.
And the subterranean waters that are under these ice currents “can affect their flow and, therefore, influence the transport of the ice out of the Antarctic continent,” the researcher clarified.
The help of an electromagnetic wave scanner
The researchers achieved their finding thanks to an electromagnetic (EM) geophysical method that uses variations in the earth’s electric and magnetic fields to measure the resistivity of the ground (something like scanning the ground to see how it behaves when waves pass through it). ).
This is the first time this method has been used to search for groundwater under a glacial ice stream.: “We have obtained images from the ice bed to about five kilometers and even deeper,” explained Kerry Key, co-author of the study.
Following the research-proven success of this technique, Gustafson believes it’s time “people start considering electromagnetism as part of the standard Antarctic geophysical toolkit.”
A lake with a depth of “almost two Empire State Buildings”
In a second part of the investigation, a geographical analysis showed that a A thick layer of sediment extends below the ice base from half a kilometer to almost two kilometres, before reaching bedrock.
The authors also confirmed that the sediments are loaded with liquid water to the bottom, and according to their calculations, if all of it were removed, it would form a lake between 220 and 820 meters deep.
If the Empire State Building is used as a reference, with 420 meters high, “At the shallow end, the water would be halfway up the building, and at the deep end, it would be almost two Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other, which is significant because the subglacial lakes in this area have between two and 15 meters deep”, said Gustafson.
The team it only imaged one ice stream, but “there is probably groundwater beneath more Antarctic ice streams”, they pointed out. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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