Strange shape under the ice of Antarctica

The latest Antarctic news comes to us from an international team of researchers that deployed an unmanned submarine called Ram that belongs to the University of Gothenburg, which is in Sweden, Ran submerged into the cavity of the Doson ice shelf in the West Antarctica and scanned the underside of what was found under this platform, he did so with an advanced sonar system.

This robotic submarine is a marvel in itself, it deserves a report, it could be the father of submarines that are designed to explore the oceans of the frozen moons, because it is not the typical robot submarine that is controlled from the boat, the Ran can be programmed to execute its tasks under the ice in total darkness and can remain on its mission for more than 24 hours without communicating with the control team.

This submarine worked for 27 days, traveling a total of more than 1000 km round trip under the glacier, going 17 km into the cavity. This ice platform floats on the sea, but its origin is the ice that slowly disappears. sliding from the mainland through tributary glaciers, what this submarine discovered is worrying. The ice base is not smooth, but there are ice peaks and valleys with plateaus and strange structures that resemble “sand dunes”. It is not clear how they could have formed, the researchers hypothesize that these structures could have been formed. formed by the flow of water under the influence of the Earth's rotation, but at the moment it is only a hypothesis. The submarine also saw evidence of very high melting in the vertical fractures that extend through the glacier, these findings are not a good sign, the ice shelf that is above the sea does not affect the level of the oceans because it is already on the water, but it acts as a plug maintaining the immense mass of ice that is on the Antarctic continent. If that plug, if that ice shelf melts and disappears, the glaciers that are on land will advance rapidly towards the sea and that that will affect the ocean level throughout the planet, we will be attentive to what happens on this Antarctic ice shelf.