City-sized holes on Antarctica’s ice shelves offer tantalizing ‘window’ into the frozen continent’s underworld | Live Science
Enormous, city-size holes that open up on Antarctica’s ice shelf may be linked to the formation of giant icebergs that calve off of the frozen continent, a new study has found.
These “windows into the sub-shelf environment” could offer clues about how the ice is melting deep beneath the surface, lead author Elena Savidge, a doctoral candidate in the Colorado School of Mines’ Department of Geophysics, told Live Science.
Vast ice sheets cover Antarctica’s landmass and flow toward the coast, while ice shelves sit above the water surrounding the continent. The biggest factors leading to ice loss are calving and the melting of the bottom layer of ice, Savidge said. As the ice shelf shrinks and thins, its ability to push back on the flow from the ice sheet diminishes, thus speeding up the rate at which the ice diminishes.
Nothing about those Nazi bases though.