Groundbreaking new studies in the Antarctic have revealed a number of the icy region's secrets.
The researchers used a hot-water drill and an underwater robotic vehicle to reveal a unique ecosystem of fish and invertebrates beneath the frigid Antarctic ice. The recent findings also provide insight into how Antarctica's ice sheets are influenced by the warming world, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln reported.
"UNL team members once again demonstrated their engineering and operational expertise by providing clean access to a challenging, unexplored sub-ice environment," said Frank Rack, executive director of the ANDRILL (Antarctic Drilling Project) Science Management Office and UNL's principal investigator for the project.
One of the crowning achievements was taking the opportunity to take a first look at the region in which the ice shelf meets the sea floor in what is referred to as the "grounding zone." In order to do this, the research team bore through an impressive 2,000 feet of ice.
"This season we accessed another critical polar environment, which has never been directly sampled by scientists before: the grounding zone of the Antarctic ice sheet," said Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a chief scientist on the project.
The findings offer clues as to how climate change is affecting this remote region. In one finding the researchers noticed a layer of pebbles at the bottom of the seawater cavity that appear to have dropped from the ice as it melted. This observation could help scientists measure how fast the ice is melting as well as the stability of the region. If the Ross Ice Shelf (where the finding was made) does collapse it would allow glaciers to rapidly flow into the ocean, making a huge contribution to global sea level rise.
Three papers describing the WISSARD hot water drill system were published in the journal Annals of Glaciology in December and a recent Scientific American article about the expedition can be found here.
