A Giant, Mysterious Hole Has Opened Up in Antarctica

a reply to: Baddogma>>>> I was listening to a guest and weekend host on Coast To Coast AM and they mentioned the ice melt in Antarctica. It got a little convoluted when they suggested that perhaps the ice melt might be CAUSING the increase in geothermal activity. ???? That was so blatantly backwards reasoning that I wrote them off as being pro global warming and anti science. But temperatures at the poles haven't been rising, they've been at normal or even below normal ranges and ice has been increasing. The ice melt and sliding of glaciers has been linked to volcanic activity at the south pole. If I want a more mysterious cause, I could say it was aliens or they're building something down there and that explains the rumors about teams going down there in secret. Anyway, enjoy the approaching ice age and if you have beach front property you're going to get some extra property as sea levels continue to drop.

a reply to: pavil
The Maud rise is indeed of volcanic origin. It is also very old. It is thought it is the result of a hot spot which was left behind a long time ago. About 100 million years ago. Not likely to be active.

Based on the presence of mantle xenocrysts, the high concentration of incompatible elements, the spatial and chem-ical affinity with other ocean island basalts from the area, and the relative age of the basalt (overlain by late Campanian sediments), it is suggested that Maud Rise was probably generated by hot-spot activity, possible during a ridge crest jump prior to 84 Ma (anomaly 34 time).

www-odp.tamu.edu...

By the way guys

Have no fear..

Secureteam10 has picked up the story!!

Oh man...

a reply to: Dutchowl

The ice melt and sliding of glaciers has been linked to volcanic activity at the south pole.

This story is not about glacial ice.

Anyway, enjoy the approaching ice age and if you have beach front property you're going to get some extra property as sea levels continue to drop.

Sea levels are not dropping.

a reply to: Reverbs

Cue the spooky keyboard music!

Man, if they show a saucer flying out of some random ice hole...



eta: unintentional! I'll leave it as is!

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Hahaha, but to be fair, it's to be expected.

a reply to: Reverbs

This story has gone in strange directions!

I've learned a bunch. Overall, it is nice to see something that is not completely known.

The story keeps popping up in various places like it is brand new. Now featured in a secureteam10 video! Sometimes I miss The National Enquirer! Oh, I haven't looked, but I wonder what the Onion has done with this? Oh well.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Rod from god?
Punched a hole with his pole?

Lol


I hope we get further developments.
I was pleasantly surprised with the neutron stars today, so who knows?

a reply to: Phage

This is a periodic phenomenon
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

Someone is trying to catch a polar bear.

There are green pea's placed near the edge, next they wait for a bear to come over for a pea ... then they kick it in the ice hole.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF




Subjective analysis of Antarctic polynia by ATS member Ophiuchus 13...

Some things to be considered before analysis.

a) Does the polynia that has formed breach completely through the top ice sheet/shelf surface ice down into the continential shelf ground line?

b) Or does the vertical depth of the polynia stop before fully breaching the lower ice sheet/shelf before touching the ground?

I feel these questions are important in order to better grasp the "activity" going on there.

If the polynia does punch completely down through to the continental shelf there could be various activities causing it so far inland.

Activities such as:

New, forming or now active dormant volcanos releasing large amounts of heat from below the ice sheet/shelf.

The heat source or sources collectively are forming a hole or holes from multiple sub sheet/shelf ice volcanos.
The hole or holes combined heat from multiple heat sources breach the upper ice sheet/shelf above Antarctic continental ground forming the polynia from continental shelf up to ice sheet/shelf surface...

Or there is some sophisticated intelligent activity going on down there. As a Conspiracy Theorists I will let your imagination decide

The scenario b)

Visualize the ice sheet/shelf horizontally fracturing in various areas. Over time the fractures seal and refill with sea water that freezes.
Now visualize a deep groove formed from a larger again horizontal fracture within the ice shelf that reaches deep into the ice sheet. This fracture then allows warmer sea water to flow in further inland below the thicker ice shelf/sheet.

Since the warmer sea water is able to flow through the deep horizontal fracture or groove and not be sealed and refrozen the ice above it at a faster rate melts, forming the polynia further inland perhaps until the sea water below freezes again.

a reply to: Ophiuchus 13

Thanks for illustration and analysis!

As for what is happening here... it is "mysterious"...


The ice sheet does not touch the sea floor. Phage said the polynya is over 16,000 feet of open water.

There are layers of water below the ice sheet (stratified, like your illustration). It sits over a floor shelf known as the Maud Rise. That typically appears from under sea volcanic activity. There appears to be no current volcanism (it is an old structure).

Something appears to be mixing the layers below the sheet ice causing the hole to form. And grow. It appeared last year. The last season it grew to a huge size (same size as Lake Superior). The satellite photo at OP source shows open water so this goes all the way through. The quote was, "it looks like somebody punched a hole through the ice".

Phage posted a paper from the arXiv asking if the ice from the melted area mixes with the sea water causing it to reform. The mixture may be held by the Maud until conditions are right when the water moves upward causing the polynya.

This is a conspiracy site, right? So always open to other explanations or comments!


That is a brief summary from the questions and responses to this thread.

Many thanks to all how have contributed to the thread!

originally posted by: Timely
Someone is trying to catch a polar bear.

There are green pea's placed near the edge, next they wait for a bear to come over for a pea ... then they kick it in the ice hole.

No polar bears in Antarctica.

a reply to: Phage

I was letting have one!

(I know it just his sense of humor!)

originally posted by: Phage

originally posted by: Timely
Someone is trying to catch a polar bear.

There are green pea's placed near the edge, next they wait for a bear to come over for a pea ... then they kick it in the ice hole.

No polar bears in Antarctica.

And no humour in phageville ...

"Most global ocean observations acquire measurements in the open ocean or in the top layers of the water, while our research shows that important mixing processes may be occurring in the deep ocean in thin layers over sloping topography," says senior author Andrew Thompson, professor of environmental science and engineering at Caltech.

Thompson and his colleagues deployed two autonomous underwater drones, or "gliders," for a period of eight months over the course of a year and a half in the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica. The team concentrated on the region around Drake Passage, the 1,000-kilometer-wide waterway between Antarctica and South America.

The gliders were able to reach depths of 1,000 meters—nearly scraping the bottom at times. They carry instruments to measure temperature, salinity, the quantity of various nutrients like nitrogen and iron, and other variables. When the gliders come to the surface, they regularly relay this data back to Thompson and his colleagues. In this way, they were able to document strong mixing occurring in thin layers in the waters near the "edges" of the coastline, where ocean currents rub up against the rising continental mass of Antarctica.

"There is growing evidence that topography plays a bigger role in oceanographic mixing than we had previously suspected," says lead author Xiaozhou Ruan, a Caltech graduate student. "While this boundary region represents a small fraction of the ocean, the interaction between water and continental topography plays an outsized role in mixing."

phys.org, Dec. 4, 2017 - Undersea topography generates hot spots of ocean mixing.

Another study and some information on what happens under the ice in Antarctica. The layers hit the continent and mix. That slope off the Maud becomes more interesting.

I tried the URL to the paper but Nature came back with a server error. I was wondering if there was a particular place they were sending their glider around. They did say they were going to focus on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in their next round of flights.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

I'm sure they said on QI that the hottest place on earth was under Antarctica.

Anybody out there remember the OP?

The Maud-Rise Polynya was spotted in mid September 2017 in the center of an ice pack in Antarctica's Lazarev Sea, causing researchers to question how this phenomenon occurred during Antarctica's coldest, winter months when ice is at its thickest.

Mr. Phage pointed us all to an arxiv paper describing the Maud-Rise area and the research that has gone into this phenomena which was only noticed in the 1970's when we finally got satellites up monitoring Antarctic ice sheets and the surrounding seas.

The actual "cause" was still a mystery. We all kind of thought it had to come from below the ice and possibly hit the Maud Rise and be forced upward. What that actually was was left uncertain. Some thought it was volcanic, some thought warm water transport (or cold water transport) was being interrupted. Then the ice above was being melted away...

Due to its difficult access location, NYUAD scientists used a combination of satellite observations and reanalysis data to discover that cyclones (as intense as category 11 in the Beaufort Scale) and the strong winds that they carry over the ice pack cause ice to shift in opposite directions, which leads to the opening of the Polynya.

phys.org, April 24, 2019 - Uncovering Polynya: Research unravels 43-year-old mystery in Antarctica.

Reviewing already gathered data, it turns out wind was causing the ice to shift and open up! It came from the surface!!

This study examines the role of atmospheric forcings in the occurrence of open‐ocean polynyas by investigating the case of the austral winter 2017's polynya located in the Lazarev Sea sector to the east of the Weddell Sea, known as the Maud Rise polynya. The ice‐free zone appeared in mid‐September 2017 and grew to as large as 80,000 square kilometers by the end of October 2017 before merging with the open ocean after the sea ice started to retreat at the beginning of the austral summer. Using a combination of satellite observations and reanalysis data at high spatio‐temporal resolution, we found that severe cyclones, occurring over the ice pack, have a deterministic role in creating strong divergence in the sea ice field through strong cyclonic surface‐winds leading to the opening of the polynya. The occurrence of intense and frequent cyclones over the ice pack during austral winter 2017 was unusual, and it occurred under an enhanced strong positive meridional transport of heat flux and moisture toward Antarctica associated with an amplification of the atmospheric zonal wave 3 and a strong positive SAM index.

doi.org, 10.1029/2019JD030618, Polar cyclones at the origin of the reoccurrence of the Maud Rise Polynya in austral winter 2017.

That is from the abstract from the paper. Warm air pushed cyclones of air over the ice pack causing "divergence" (i.e., holes and cracks) to form in the ice itself leading down to open water.

I wonder, if that is the case, if that is how the near perfectly circular ones were formed?? Maybe it comes from the process of re-freezing. I wonder if that is how Artic polyna are also formed?

And if it happens on Earth, shouldn't we be able to observe the same on other solar bodies??

Anyway, to finish the abstract and answer a couple more questions... (same doi source)

We found that the opening of the polynya was not primarily due to direct ice melt by thermodynamic effects but rather to strong dynamical forcing by the winds on the sea ice, as in the case of coastal polynyas. Indeed, the meridional transport of heat toward Antarctica occurred over the Weddell Sea sector (i.e. to the east of the Lazarev Sea sector where the polynya is located) whereas the Lazarev Sea sector was under the influence of equatorward transport of cold air masses at that time. Our results show that the supply of warm and moist air coming from the west side of the South Atlantic Ocean into the Weddell Sea, significantly increased the potential for cyclone formation as measured by the Eady growth rate leading to intense and frequent cyclogenesis over the ice pack, far south from the ice edge. After cyclogenesis in the Weddell Sea, these cyclones intensified as they moved eastward spinning over the Lazarev Sea with intensity comparable to category 11 ‐ violent storms ‐ in the Beaufort scale. The cyclonic winds generated sea ice divergence by pushing the ice away from the cyclone center: to the east north of it and to the west south of it, which led the reoccurrence of the Maud Rise polynya in mid‐September 2017.

"Cyclogenesis"! Huh?! Wind... who knew?

originally posted by: Reverbs
a reply to: the2ofusr1

You got me..

And now I'm hearing way more about Antarctica than before and I'm perplexed..

There are these oasis areas in many locations very close to the Southpole that have warm air circulating .. Russia and us put lots of equipment in these areas..

Scientist named Behrendt came across a lake with pinkish flowers growing in it..

I'm seeing at least 3 probably many mire of these about 200 square like areas of warm weather.. soil getting up to 77 degrees..

It's from this video.. would be weird if the warm areas are are related to the sea ice hole..

thanks for posting this video.I must now unglue my eyeballs from my screen.!!