Massive Groundwater Systems Lie Beneath Antarctic Ice
If we want to understand the impacts of a warming planet, we must first learn how its coldest regions are faring. Melting ice leads to sea level rise, but our understanding of the properties of ice sheets and the ways ice streams transport fast flowing ice and sediment from ice sheets to ocean basins has been incomplete.
Now, researchers led by Chloe Gustafson, a geophysicist and postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, have confirmed scientific suspicions, uncovering significant groundwater amid sediment below ice sheets in Whillans Ice Stream in Antarctica.
“If we want numbers we can be confident in…for sea level rise contributions from ice sheets, we have to get this component right.”
“It’s this missing process that hasn’t been considered in our conceptual models of how ice streams work,” Gustafson said of the study, which was published in Science. Scientists aren’t yet sure how these groundwater systems will affect the ice sheet above them, but they represent a new and potentially weighty factor in modeling the behavior of ice sheets.
The groundwater “has potential to shape how the ice sheets evolve dramatically,” said Stanford glaciologist Dustin Schroeder, who was not involved with the study. “If we want numbers we can be confident in…for sea level rise contributions from ice sheets, we have to get this component right.”
