Ancient Rocky Structure Found Beneath Antarctica. And It’s Messing With The Ice
According to new research published May 27 in the journal Nature Geoscience, this boundary protects the ice shelf’s grounding line, the point at which it is thick enough to extend all the way to the sea floor. “We could see that the geological boundary was making the seafloor on the East Antarctic side much deeper than the West, and that affects the way the ocean water circulates under the ice shelf,” study leader Kirsty Tinto, a research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, said in a statement. [Antarctica: The Ice-Covered Bottom of the World (Photos)]
The Ross ice shelf is an expanse of ice 185,000 square miles (480,000) square kilometers) in area and hundreds of feet thick.
Source: www.livescience.com