When Anna Wåhlin and her colleagues deployed a submersible vehicle to go under the ice in Antarctica, they meant for it to serve as a proof of concept for the technology. Instead, what they found has left them more mystified than ever. The first detailed maps from the underside of the Doston Ice Shelf in Antarctica revealed patterns that couldn’t be explained by existing models. On one side of the ice shelf, areas where the ice had melted were shaped like teardrops. The other side, however, resembled landscapes on ice. “When we saw the first teardrop, we thought ‘Oh, that’s a really funny shape,’ but then we saw more and more and they were everywhere in the western side,” Wåhlin, an oceanographer and professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, told Mongabay in a video interview. On the eastern side, Wåhlin said it was much more dramatic, with “thick shapes carved into the ice that looked a little bit like the Grand Canyon where the water had eaten away into the ice.” A study co-authored by Wåhlin and published in the journal Science Advances documents how the team developed and deployed the autonomous underwater vehicle that traveled more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) back and forth under the Doston Ice Shelf over the course of 27 days in 2022. The study was conducted as part of a project monitoring how atmospheric and oceanic processes impact ice shelves. Ice shelves are floating masses of ice attached to land mass. Image…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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