An Antarctic ice shelf sings and it sounds like a sci-fi soundtrack

One of the largest ice blocks in the world sings.

A wind blowing on the rough surface of the Ross ice floe in Antarctica causes the production of an ice extent the size of France. According to a study published Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters

the sounds are too weak to be heard by humans, but the accelerated renderings have been compared to everything from the haunted drone of a didgeridoo. on the soundtrack of a movie about extraterrestrials in the 1950s.

The discovery of singing ice came by accident.

To learn more about the pack ice that floats on the Southern Ocean next to the Antarctic continent, researchers in 2014 dozens of seismic sensors buried under the snow-covered plateau. But when scientists undertook to badyze more than two years of data collected by the sensors, they discovered that the rough surface of the shelf – what scientists call the walnut layer – vibrated almost constantly.

Scientists have also discovered that the frequency of vibration has changed as a result of changing weather conditions on the plateau – for example, when the temperature has increased or decreased, and when storms have reshaped the snowy dunes of the plateau.

The fir tree was "alive with vibrations," said Douglas MacAyeal, a glaciologist at the University of Chicago, in a written commentary that accompanied the paper. "It was discovered that this vibration was caused by the wind blowing on the pine layer and interacted with the intrinsic roughness of the surface called sastrugi".

MacAyeal also proposed a more poetic description of sound, comparing it to "the buzz produced by thousands of cicadas when they invaded the treetops and grbades in late summer."

Julien Chaput, a geophysicist and mathematician at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and head of research, told NBC News MACH in an email that the sound sounded "a bit like yodel, except that 10 people were all singing in dissonance. It's a bit strange. "

But the singing ice is more than a sound curiosity. Chaput and his colleagues argue in their article that it might be possible to tap into seismic data to help monitor the health of the ice floes, which have cleared up due to global warming – and which have caused the rise sea ​​level all over the world.

Satellite data proved to be useful for tracking conditions on ice shelves, but Chaput said seismic monitoring may be more nuanced.

"Our current plan is to exploit all existing Antarctic seismic stations and see if we can get a broad sense of" snow health "and deploy more stations on the vulnerable ice plateaus of Western Antarctic, "he said, adding that the data could turn out to be the" canary in the mines "for monitoring the polar regions.

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