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When ice sheets break apart, they sing a song of change.
As you probably know, the Arctic has a lot of glaciers. Maybe some Arctic god is dealing with cramps and needs them for the ice packs. Maybe she just thinks they look cool.
In any case, many of these glaciers are connected by ice shelves, pieces of ice than keep glaciers from floating away. A group of scientists from Colorado State University (among others) has been studying the Ross Ice Shelf, the world’s largest ice shelf, for the last couple years, and the researchers recently made an unexpected musical discovery.
By burying instruments that measure motion in the ice, the scientists came across something they were not expecting: a song. Apparently, as the wind whistles past the dune-like ice, it “sings.” And once you run it through technology to turn it into something the human ear recognizes, the tune sounds something like this:
“It’s kind of like you’re blowing a flute, constantly, on the ice shelf,” explained Julien Chaput, a Colorado State University geophysicist who worked on the study.
Thanks to global warming, ice shelves are melting. The scientists noticed that, during their study, the song changed. As ice melted, the notes got lower. Even as the weather changed, the song stayed lower than it was before. The scientists think this means lasting climate change is occurring.
Scientists hope they can use these sounds as warning signs to figure our when ice sheets are about to break. No word yet on what we can really do with these warnings, how to fix the Arctic or how to stop climate change. Maybe someone will decode the song further and find some instructions.
When ice sheets break apart, they sing a song of change.
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