See what it's like to land planes in Antarctica 2:24
(CNN) --
Hidden deep within the ice sheet that covers Antarctica, scientists have discovered an enormous amount of water.
The groundwater system is found in deep sediments in West Antarctica and is likely to have the consistency of a wet sponge.
The system reveals an uncharted part of the region and may have implications for how the frozen continent reacts to the climate crisis, according to new research.
"People have hypothesized that there might be deep groundwater in these sediments, but until now, no one had done any detailed imaging," said study lead author Chloe Gustafson, a postdoctoral fellow in oceanography at the Scripps Institution of the University of California. University of California at San Diego, in a statement.
UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher Chloe Gustafson prepares to set up a magnetotelluric station to map beneath the ice during fieldwork in 2018 in Antarctica. (Credit: Kerry Key/Columbia University)
"Antarctica contains 57 meters of sea level rise potential, so we want to make sure we're incorporating all the processes that control how ice flows from the continent into the oceans. Groundwater is currently a missing process." in our ice flow models," he added in an email.
Research on water in Antarctica
The ice sheet that covers Antarctica is not a rigid whole.
Researchers in Antarctica have in recent years discovered hundreds of interconnected liquid lakes and rivers cradled within the same ice.
But this is the first time that large amounts of liquid water have been found in sediments beneath the ice.
advertising
The authors of this study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, focused on the 60-mile-wide Whillans ice stream, one of half a dozen streams that feed the Ross Ice Shelf, the ice shelf. largest ice cap in the world, about the size of Canada's Yukon Territory.
Gustafson and his colleagues spent six weeks in 2018 mapping the sediments below the ice.
The research team used geophysical instruments placed directly on the surface to run a technique called magnetotelluric imaging.
The team of researchers spent six weeks in Antarctica.
The technique can detect the different degrees of electromagnetic energy conducted by ice, sediment, freshwater bedrock, and saltwater and create a map from these different sources of information.
"We imaged from the ice bed down to about five kilometers and even deeper," said co-author Kerry Key, an associate professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, in a separate statement.
The researchers calculated that if they were able to squeeze groundwater out of the sediments in the 100 square kilometers they mapped on the surface, it would form a lake that ranged from 220 to 820 meters deep.
"The Empire State Building to the antenna is about 420 meters tall," Gustafson, who conducted the research as a graduate student at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said in the statement.
"At the shallow end, the water would rise halfway up the Empire State Building. At the deep end, it's almost two Empire States stacked on top of each other. This is significant because the subglacial lakes in this area are between 2 and 15 meters deep. That's like one to four stories of the Empire State Building."
How did they get there?
The team checks data from a magnetotelluric station they used to map below the ice sheet.
The mapping revealed that the water became saltier with depth, which was a result of how the groundwater system formed.
Ocean water likely reached the area during a warm period 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, saturating the sediment with salty seawater.
As the ice advanced, fresh meltwater produced by pressure from above and friction at the base of the ice was forced into the upper sediments.
It likely continues to seep and mix with groundwater today, Key said.
The researchers said more work is needed to understand the implications of the groundwater discovery, particularly in relation to the climate crisis and rising sea levels.
It was possible that the slow drainage of water from the ice into the sediment could prevent water from accumulating at the base of the ice, acting as a brake on the advance of the ice towards the sea.
However, if the surface ice cap were to thin, the reduction in pressure could allow this deep water to gush out.
This upward movement would lubricate the base of the ice and speed up its flow.
"This finding highlights groundwater hydrology as a potentially critical piece in understanding the effect of water flow on Antarctic ice sheet dynamics," wrote Winnie Chu, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in a commentary on The research was published in the journal Science.
She did not participate in the study.
Antarctica