Scientists have finally found Antarctica’s missing groundwater, which will help them predict ice flows on the continent.
, Gustafson’s team offers a long-awaited schematic of the watery world underneath the ice. A vast reservoir of groundwater reaches more than a kilometer below subglacial water features like Lake Whillans, containing 10 times as much water. To see it, the researchers turned to a technique called magnetotellurics, or MT, which harnesses natural variations in Earth’s electromagnetic field to sketch out a broad picture of the sediment below.
But without groundwater, those models are incomplete. Researchers had long observed that more water was spilling out from underneath the Whillans ice stream than expected, says Slawek Tulaczyk, a professor of earth sciences at UC Santa Cruz who studies the region but wasn’t involved in the research. This was strange. As ice sheets approach the ocean, they tend to get thinner and thus less good at insulating the ground from the frigid Antarctic air.
MT involves using electromagnetic waves produced by a variety of sources—from the high-frequency sources like lightning to the low-frequency undulations of solar wind. As these electromagnetic waves penetrate Earth’s crust, they wobble depending on how well they are conducted, allowing scientists to study what kinds of materials lie below.
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