In the early 1970s, when satellite technology first made it possible to take pictures of the Earth from space, people also obtained a lot of strange images. One of them is a mysterious ice hole that appeared on an iceberg in the Lazarev Sea of Antarctica.
Icebergs in Antarctica fluctuate with the seasons. Winter is abundant, summer is gone. However, the problem is that on an iceberg, there is a very strange hole that no one can explain, even though it has taken decades to find out.
On an iceberg appeared a very strange hole that no one could explain.
Around the end of 2017 – Antarctica’s coldest winter month, when the ice was most dense – that hole suddenly appeared. It is up to 9,500km 2 , and continuously expands to 740% over the next 2 months before disappearing when summer arrives.
But finally, after decades of hard work recently, experts from New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) have got the answer. These pits are called polynya (or ephemeral craters), which are leftovers from large sea tornadoes.
In September 2017, waves of warm and cold air collided over Antarctica, creating a tornado with wind speeds of up to 117km/h. Tsunami waves up to 16m high broke out, pushing the ice in all directions around the center of the storm. When the storm dissipates, what is left will be the gathered icebergs, with a hole in the middle – the exact location of the storm’s center.
Although the story that comes out sounds downright fierce, the consequences polynya creates are somewhat interesting, even important. It creates an excellent habitat for polar wildlife, including seals and penguins, as well as habitat for plankton.
Polynya pits are like windows, connecting the world under the ice with the sky.
However, these holes can also be seen as a sign of climate change.
“Polynya craters are like windows, connecting the world under the ice to the sky, and transporting large amounts of energy between the ocean and the atmosphere during the winter,” said study author Diana Francis.
” Because of their large size, they affect the climate of the whole region, and even globally as the ocean continues to rotate.”
This is what makes this study so important. The polynya can essentially create a good habitat for animals, but their presence also has a big impact on the climate, and may even affect the rate at which the Earth is warming today. As they appear more and more, science’s climate prediction models also become increasingly inaccurate.
According to Francis, it is very important to find polynya craters capable of affecting so many things, and the odds of them actually doing so are relatively high. As the climate is getting warmer, storms are also stronger, more frequent and closer to Antarctica, creating conditions for polynya to appear more and more.
To predict climate disasters, the addition of a polynya variable is actually not what scientists expect.
The study was published in the journal Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.