We are in the middle of the southern summer, so there are currently many scientific expeditions that take advantage of the more bearable environmental conditions to travel to Antarctica and study different aspects of this unknown and vulnerable continent.
Antarctica is changing rapidly as a result of climate change and some of its great glaciers are receding without stopping. A few days ago, a team of researchers who are part of a scientific expedition that aims to study the stability of one of them, the Thwaites glacier , made an unexpected discovery that has been announced in the journal Nature .
“I think I’ve seen rocks!” shouted an officer aboard the ship as it passed near Pine Island Bay. After consulting their charts and making the corresponding checks, the crew confirmed that it was indeed a new island. Why had it gone unnoticed until now? Despite being large enough to be detected by satellites, surely the enormous layer of ice that covers it helped to hide it. In addition, it is in a very little traveled area, which also makes it difficult to detect with the naked eye.
Another effect of the thaw
On the other hand, and as explained in the Nature article, it is likely that the island has emerged a short time ago. “The retreating glaciers from western Antarctica were putting a lot of pressure on the Earth’s crust,” explains Lindsay Prothro, a glacial geologist at the University of Texas. “By releasing that pressure, the crust can rise.”
And what happens to the ice on the surface? For one thing, if the land emerges too quickly, it could break apart, contributing to the loss of glaciers. But, on the other hand, a rising continental shelf can serve as an anchor, increasing the stability of glaciers and delaying their disappearance into the sea. This new island, as Lauren Simkins, a glacial geologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, explains, is a perfect real case study to analyze these effects.
In fact, the expedition team of scientists has yet to collect different samples from the new island and, since they will not return from their trip until the end of March, the official announcement of the same will still take some time.
It is not a new phenomenon
In recent years, more cases have been documented of new islands emerging as a result of the retreat of the ice sheets. At the end of last year, without going any further, the Russian Defense Ministry announced the discovery of five new islands in the remote arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. And, according to a report by the United Nations, it is estimated that in the last five years the Arctic has registered the greatest loss of glaciers in its history as a result of global warming.
The discovery of this new island in Antarctica represents a never-before-seen opportunity to reconstruct the geological history of a region of the Earth that has been little studied. But, in turn, it also alerts us to the rapid and irreversible changes that the frozen continent is undergoing.
This article is adapted from the one published by Giuliana Viglione in the news section of Nature magazine on February 21, 2020: New Antarctic island spotted as mammoth glacier retreats
