Buried way underneath Antarctica’s ice, researchers have found an enormous, continent-sized network of basins we never knew were there until now.
According to a recent study published in Nature Geoscience, an international team led by geophysicist Egidio Armadillo of the University of Genoa has identified what they call the East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province, or EAFBP. We’ve already known about other Antarctic basins, like the Wilkes and Aurora basins, and also the enormous Lake Vostok, but what we didn’t know is that they are all connected to a larger subterranean megastructure of basins that we couldn’t have discovered without the help of modern tech.
Researchers took older massive datasets collected over the decades with a variety of equipment, like seismic readings, subglacial topography, and radar surveys, and combined them all with models of how the land would rebound if the 27 million cubic kilometers of ice covering the continent were suddenly removed. That reconstruction revealed a massive pattern of basins radiating outward from a central point near the South Pole.
The Basins Beneath Antarctica Spread Outward 2,000 Kilometers
The researchers compared it to a handheld fan, with the central point being the pivot from which the rest of the basins emanate. All those basins spread outward along roughly 2,000 kilometers of coastline, which suggests to scientists that they formed through a process called rotational extension, where the Earth’s crust stretches and rotates around a central focal point.
Since the basins are beneath about half of the East Antarctic ice sheet, nestled about two miles below, researchers think they might play a big role in determining how ice flows across the continent, since ice moves not independently, but according to the grooves of the bedrock below it. This is especially important to know, considering that climate change is going to radically alter Antarctica’s ice. It’s good to get a baseline understanding of how it moves in the first place so we can better predict how it’s going to move when the disaster of climate change truly sets in.
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