Something strange and hot is hiding under the ice of Antarctica

Something unusual – and very hot – is happening under the icecaps of Antarctica.

A new study has shown that the Antarctic Ice Sheet of the South Pole has a giant "hotspot" – three times larger than London – under its bedrock.

As reported in the newspaper Scientific reports This week, the extremely hot zone should not make Antarctica disappear any time soon. However, researchers noted that its extreme heat had caused the subsidence of an ice cover of 100 km by 50 km (62 km by 31 km), as shown in the graph below.

"It was a really exciting project, exploring one of the last areas of the planet totally unsupervised. Our results were quite unexpected, as many people thought that this region of Antarctica was made of old and cold rocks, which had little impact on the ice cover above, "said the principal author, Dr. Tom Jordan of the British Antarctic Survey. declaration. "We show that even in the old continental interior, the underlying geology can have a significant impact on the ice."

It's unknown how long the hotspot has been there, but it's certainly not new. Researchers believe that it has existed for thousands, even millions of years. That said, the external environment is changing rapidly. With the continuing rise in global temperatures, this part of the Antarctic ice could become particularly vulnerable to melting.

"In the future, the excess water in the ice sheet could make this region more sensitive to external factors such as climate change," added Dr. Jordan.

Heat is believed to be generated by unusually radioactive rocks in the earth's crust, as well as geothermally heated water from subterranean depths. However, to tell the truth, scientists are not sure because they do not have access to rocks.

The British Antarctic Survey team came to this conclusion using radar data collected by an aircraft to scan through 3 km (1.8 miles) of ice, providing them with all kinds of lighting on the thickness , the structure and conditions of the ice sheet and its layers. .

This project also aimed to fill the gaps in an incredible European Space Agency mission that used satellite gravimetric mapping data around the South Pole to observe the Earth's lithosphere under ice. The results have been remarkable. As a recent study reveals, their work has uncovered a mosaic of continents and geological features that have long since been lost in the Earth's lithosphere.