Antarctica is an excellent place in the old-fashioned understanding of the word. Icebergs, steep mountains, and grinding glaciers every configuration, and an unprecedented range of structure Antarctica's fascinating landscape.
Much of Antarctica's landscape, because the continent is so remote and foreboding, remains unknown. Scientists are looking into Antarctica's nooks and crannies and even its subsurface, discovering a world that seems unimaginable from more temperate climes with new tools and new expeditions. Here are a number of the secrets Antarctica revealed in 2019.
1. A giant, growing void
Imagine an ice cave two-thirds the world of Manhattan and nearly 1,000 feet (300 meters) tall. Hard to imagine? It's real, and it's under the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica.
Glacier and bedrock's gap was discovered this year by NASA scientists, who said much of the void formed from a melt in just a couple of years.
Using ice-penetrating, satellite-based radar, they found a void that when held 15 billion tons (13.6 billion metric tons) of ice. The gap could also be contributing to the glacier's movement and melt, researchers reported within the journal Science Advances.
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2. A rare lava lake
In times, Antarctica still holds surprises. Take Saunders Island, a volcanic protuberance within the South Hawaiian Islands. The icy crag of Mount Michael, the island's volcanic summit, holds one among only eight lava lakes in the world.
Scientists discovered the crater lake because of thermal imaging from satellite data. Unlike most exposed lava on the surface, the lake remains molten. Its temperature within the lake reaches between 1,812 and 2,334 degrees Fahrenheit (989 and 1,279 degrees Celsius).
3. A surprising former resident
Long ago, Antarctica was a warmer place, home to dinosaurs, and plush flowers. Even before the dinosaurs roamed, an iguana-like Triassic reptile called the Antarctica home.
Researchers stated the discovery of the reptile, called Antarctanax shackletoni, this year. The 250 million-year-old creature was an archosaur, a precursor to the lineage that might branch into dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and crocodilians. This animal probably grew to 4 to five feet (1.2 to 1.5 meters) long, and scuttled around what was then the Antarctic forest floor.
4. Oddly shaped icebergs
Wind and water sculpt Antarctica's ice into strange shapes, but this takes the cake (and quite seems like one): In October, scientists snapped aerial photos of floating rectangular 'bergs near the northern Antarctic Peninsula.
The rectangular chunks were shards created by the calving of an enormous iceberg, dubbed A68, off the Larsen C shelf ice in 2017. Erosion hadn't yet had time to smooth the rectangular icebergs' corners and straight edges.
5. And ice that sings
A constant seismic hum runs Antarctica's ice - all the time. Humans can't hear the 5-hertz frequency, but researchers picked up the hum on sensors meant to detect vibrations within the ice.
This subsonic singing is caused by the movement of wind against the ice, the researchers reported in October. The song changes subtly when the ice melts or when the wind turns the form of snow dunes, making the sound a possible thanks to tracking local changes remotely.
"It's quite like you're blowing a flute, constantly, on the shelf ice," lead study author Julien Chaput, a geophysicist and mathematician at Colorado State University in Fort Collins said during a statement.
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