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Antarctica: Oddities; Discoveries; Mysteries

They might find more than fish fossils, not a great idea to dig up Antarctic mountains ...

TO FIGURE OUT how and when ancient fish first crawled from the ocean onto land, Neil Shubin is about to head to the mountains of Antarctica. Leaving behind family and friends for the upcoming holidays, he and a team of five other scientists and a mountain guide will be camping at the base of a remote mountain range that was a tropical river delta around 385 million years ago.

Using ropes and climbing gear, the scientists will be scouring cliffs and ridge lines for fossil deposits containing the earliest tetrapods, or four-limbed animals. This is the latest expedition on a fossil-hunting career that has taken Shubin to places as disparate as Ethiopia, West Virginia, and the two poles. To understand better the development of fish into land animals, he has to locate fossils that tell him the speed and direction of evolution. ...

https://www.wired.com/story/fish-le... NL 112518 (1)&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nl
 
Since 2017 NASA has mapped several warm underground caves around Antarctica’s volcanoes.

They were shocked to find the largest warm underground cave in western Antarctica under the Thwaites Glacier that would hold Manhattan, New York easily.

NASA claims that do not know what life forms that could be lurking around in these warm caves.
 
Some supernatural encounters in the frozen south
I’m never really sure whether I believe in ghosts. Despite growing up in some seriously spooky and remote old houses, I’ve never actually seen anything: no figures in white sheets, no women in suspiciously generic period costume. However, particularly when alone, I’ve felt—well, something. The sense of a presence. The idea that you’re not actually alone; that something unseen is with you. Other people, of course, might experience this as the presence of the divine. But for me, it was always something supernatural.

My debut novel, All The White Spaces, deals with a fictional expedition to Antarctica in the years immediately after the First World War. I chose to write about this setting due to a near-lifetime obsession with the so-called ‘Heroic Age’ of exploration, and the exploits of Scott, Shackleton, and other famous explorers who ‘went South’ to risk their lives in the name of discovery. Once I started to read accounts associated with these early expeditions, I was struck by how eerie they made Antarctica sound—despite the fact that the writers were your typical late Edwardian ‘stiff upper lip’ gentlemen, many described supernatural or other disturbing encounters with something which sometimes seemed to be native to Antarctica itself.
Click to expand...
https://crimereads.com/encounters-with-the-supernatural-in-antarctica-a-brief-history/
 
Maoris first to discover Antarctica?

When we think of Antarctic exploration, the narrative is overwhelmingly white. The first confirmed sighting of mainland Antarctica was attributed to a Russian expedition in 1820, while the first landing on the mainland is attributed to an American explorer in 1821.

But investigations by New Zealander researchers suggest the indigenous people of mainland New Zealand – Māori – have a significantly longer history with Earth's southernmost continent.

The research team, led by conservation biologist Priscilla Wehi from Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research, looked at oral histories as well as 'grey literature' – meaning research, reports, technical documents, and other material published by organizations outside common academic or commercial publishing channels.

"We found connection to Antarctica and its waters have been occurring since the earliest traditional voyaging, and later through participation in European-led voyaging and exploration, contemporary scientific research, fishing, and more for centuries," said Wehi back in 2021.

The researchers first highlight an early 7th century southern voyage by a Polynesian chief Hui Te Rangiora and his crew. This would have likely made them the first humans to see Antarctic waters, over a thousand years before the Russian expedition and even long before Polynesian settlers' planned migration to New Zealand.

https://www.sciencealert.com/maori-...least-1000-years-before-europeans-study-finds
 
Another view on ice melting in Antarctica.

Antarctica’s most vulnerable climate hot spot is a remote and hostile place — a narrow sliver of seawater, beneath a slab of floating ice more than half a kilometer thick. Scientists have finally explored it, and uncovered something surprising.

“The melt rate is much weaker than we would have thought, given how warm the ocean is,” says Peter Davis, an oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge who was part of the team that drilled a narrow hole into this nook and lowered instruments into it. The finding might seem like good news — but it isn’t, he says. “Despite those low melt rates, we’re still seeing rapid retreat” as the ice vanishes faster than it’s being replenished.

Davis and about 20 other scientists conducted this research at Thwaites Glacier, a massive conveyor belt of ice about 120 kilometers wide, which flows off the coastline of West Antarctica. Satellite measurements show that Thwaites is losing ice more quickly than at any time in the last few thousand years (SN: 6/9/22). It has accelerated its flow into the ocean by at least 30 percent since 2000, hemorrhaging over 1,000 cubic kilometers of ice — accounting for roughly half of the ice lost from all of Antarctica.

Much of the current ice loss is driven by warm, salty ocean currents that are destabilizing the glacier at its grounding zone — the crucial foothold, about 500 meters below sea level at the drilling location, where the ice lifts off its bed and floats (SN: 4/9/21).

Now, this first-ever look at the glacier’s underbelly near the grounding zone shows that the ocean is attacking it in previously unknown and troubling ways.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/melting-eroding-thwaites-glacier
 
And yet more Antarctica ice news.

There is now less sea-ice surrounding the Antarctic continent than at any time since we began using satellites to measure it in the late 1970s.

It is the southern hemisphere summer, when you'd expect less sea-ice, but this year is exceptional, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Winds and warmer air and water reduced coverage to just 1.91 million square km (737,000 sq miles) on 13 February. What is more, the melt still has some way to go this summer.

Last year, the previous record-breaking minimum of 1.92 million sq km (741,000 sq miles) wasn't reached until 25 February.
Three of the last record-breaking years for low sea-ice have happened in the past seven years: 2017, 2022 and now 2023.

Line chart showing the rolling 5-day average measure of sea-ice extent in Antarctica with one line per year since 1979. The three most recent years have been highlighted: in 2017 a record was set in early March; this was broken in February 2022 and again in February 2023

Research, cruise and fishing vessels are all reporting a similar picture as they make passage around the continent: most sectors are virtually ice-free.

Only the Weddell Sea remains dominated by frozen floes. ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64649596
 
There seems to be no end to the Antarctic ice data lately.

New footage has revealed Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier is shrinking from below in a way scientists hadn't expected – with melting happening rapidly along the cracks and crevasses in its base.

Though the ice loss is slower than predicted in other sections, the 130 kilometer (80 mile) wide, Florida-sized glacier could still contribute more than 65 centimeters (25 inches) of sea-level rise as it thaws over the next century or so – earning it the nickname the 'Doomsday Glacier'.

The point where the glacier meets the ocean and the seafloor, known as the 'grounding line', has already retreated 14 kilometers [8.7 miles] since the '90s and the amount of ice flowing out of the region has nearly doubled.

But exactly how melting happens at that grounding line hasn't been fully understood until now.

Using a mix of remote sensing and underwater footage captured by a robot, a team of researchers from the US and UK were able to directly observe the process beneath the Thwaites Glacier for the first time. ...

https://www.sciencealert.com/hypnot...rapidly-melting-cracks-below-doomsday-glacier

 

Mysterious 'pyramid' discovered in Antarctica beneath the ice​


…there’s also the mystery of a so-called “pyramid” which has been found on the continent.

Only, it’s not a pyramid at all – in fact, it’s a mountain.

The Ellsworth Mountains are the highest mountain range in Antarctica and stretch 400km and the mountain in question was discovered by the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-1913

​

Over the last hundred years, however, people have been speculating about the true nature of the location (even though it’s very much a mountain, poking up out of the ice) and now a second interesting geographical feature has been discovered and got them talking all over again.

The location in question is found at the coordinates 79°58’39.25?S 81°57’32.21?W, which has been a much-searched spot on Google Earth.


the-second-location-at.png


The second location at 79°58’39.25?S 81°57’32.21?W Google Earth

Geologist at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, Dr Mitch Darcy, said: “The pyramid-shaped structures are located in the Ellsworth Mountains, which is a range more than 400 km long, so it’s no surprise there are rocky peaks cropping out above the ice. The peaks are clearly composed of rock, and it’s a coincidence that this particular peak has that shape."

https://www.indy100.com/science-tech/pyramid-discovered-antarctica-google-earth-2662503325

maximus otter
 
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No, they're not the spawn of Aliens or Cthuhlu but do read on.

A Grave Warning About Antarctica Is Encoded in Octopus DNA​


Ocean bays that pinch West Antarctica are home to two distinct populations of Turquet's octopus (Pareledone turqueti). The shared secrets of their ancestors do not bode well for the future health of our planet.

A new DNA analysis of the two geographically separated octopus populations indicates they were once part of one big family.

This direct historical connection suggests that around 125,000 years ago, the massive 2.2 million cubic kilometer (530,000 cubic mile) West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) that separates the two bays had fully collapsed into the sea.

Scientists who sequenced the genomes of octopus populations in both the Weddell and Ross Seas found evidence of ancestral gene flow between the two populations roughly 70,000 years ago, suggesting that "ancient seaways were likely opened across the West Antarctic Ice Sheet". ...

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-grave-warning-about-antarctica-is-encoded-in-octopus-dna
 
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