A strange "song" from the Ross ice floe, in Antarctica, recorded by scientists

A strange sound of "song" was recorded on one of the vast expanses of Antarctic ice. The "song" was recorded for two years during the observation of seismic changes on the Ross ice floe, a plate of ice the size of Texas.

"It's a bit like you're constantly blowing on the pack ice," said Julien Chaput, a geophysicist and mathematician at Colorado State University, in a statement.

Chaput is the main author of a study on the singing ice published in the newspaper Letters of geophysical research. The discovery of the song, he says, could help scientists better watch for changes in the pack ice.

Across Antarctica, ice is weakening as a result of climate change and is likely to collapse. If and when this happens, it could have global consequences, leading to a significant rise in sea level.

A recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) revealed that we are a long way from reducing global warming to the 1.5 ° C target set in the Paris Agreement. It is therefore all the more important to monitor and understand the evolution of the shelves: it is less and less likely to prevent ice losses by limiting the warming.

A view of the ice shelf Ross. Rick Aster

The researchers note that ice shelves are "floating buttresses of large glaciers" that extend over the oceans. The Ross ice floe, several hundred meters thick and covering an area of ​​approximately 193,400 square miles, is the largest ice shelf in Antarctica. The platform is covered with "snow dunes", layers of thick snow that somehow acts on the ice preventing melting.

Chaput and his colleagues placed highly sensitive seismographs on the pack ice for two years. During this time, they discovered that the ice "sings continually" and that the song changes as the wind blows over the landscape, changing the snowy dunes.

The researchers discovered that the snow was constantly vibrating because of the wind and that it produced a sound a bit like a drum beats.

Scientists believe that observing the ice floe song is a good way to track changes in real time. "While satellite observations are limited by orbital cycles and sparse measurements, this approach allows a direct structural interpretation of environmental forcing on extremely short delays," they conclude.