250 Meter High Channel Hundreds of Kilometers Long Discovered Underneath Antarctic Ice Shelf

Credit: MODIS Mosaic of Antarctica (MOA) Image Map / Anne le Brocq.

An ice channel stretching hundreds of kilometers and reaching as high as 250 meters have been discovered under a floating ice shelf in Antarctica. The ice shelf was discovered using satellite image and radar measurements from the sky. Based on the data recorded, the channel is as tall as the Eiffel tower.

The image map from the MODIS Mosaic of Antarctica (see image above) shows the ice shelf channel as it aligns the flow route of the water under the ice sheet and the start of the ice shelf cannel. The dashed line marks the border where the ice leaves solid ground and starts to float on the ocean surface.

Ice shelves are thick platforms of ice 100 to 1000 meters thick that forms where a glacier or ice sheet flows down to a coastline and onto the ocean surface; similar to a pier or a dock. These can only be found in Antarctica, Greenland and Canada.

Around 44% of the ice shelves are connected to the Antarctic coastline covering an area of 1,541,700 km². In the image map above, the part of the ice sheet between the grounded ice (part of the ice shelf that rests on bedrock) and the floating shelf (on the ocean surface) is called the grounding line.

Data Paper on Antarctic Macrobenthic Biodiversity Publicly Available

Hydrocorals also known as sea fan in the Antarctic.
Credit: Julian Gutt, Alfred Wegener Institute

A data paper on Antarctic macrobenthic communities from approximately 90 different expeditions in the region published in the open access journal Nature Conservation is now openly available to the public under a Creative Commons By license. Macrobenthic organisms are organisms that live at the bottom of a water column and are can be seen by the naked eye.

Data papers are journal publications that describe a dataset or a group of datasets. It contains facts about the group that the data is representing, much similar to a data table. It does not contain any opinions, hypothesis or arguments.

Data papers are used to provide a citable journal publication that brings scholarly credit to data publishers; to describe the data in a structured human-readable form; and to bring the existence of the data to the attention of the scholarly community.

Studying the Behavior of Antifreeze Molecules For Commercial, Industrial, and Medical Applications

Scientists at New York University are studying the behavior of antifreeze molecules that one day can open up applications in the commercial, industrial, and medical fields.

Antifreeze proteins (AFP) are naturally occurring proteins that inhibit the formation of ice crystals when water temperature drops to freezing levels.

These proteins are usually found in organisms that live in subzero environments such as Antarctica. Certain vertebrates, plants, fungi and bacteria can inhibit the growth and recrystallization of ice in their bodies allowing them to survive in these temperatures.