In Greenland, ice is not just flowing, it is earthquakes and earthquakes

Andreas Fichtner, when a fiber-optic cable was dried in a deep hole in Greenland’s ice, he did not expect to find a completely new way of using glaciers. Even when the cable began to send information back, his first reaction was suspected.

“Garbage,” Doctor Fichtner, Seismology and Wave Prof. Dive’s University of Switzerland Eth Zurich is a wave Prof. “Only some electronic noise.”

This was August 2022. The field season in Greenland is almost over. Cold, altitude, long hours – all wore Dr. Fichtner and compatriots. However, for a recent experience, they saved one of their cables, which would allow them to measure small movements inside the wide ice river, as it flows towards the sea.

Things they find are raising the questions about how scientists move the ice sheets of ice sheets and add ice sheets and add to sea levels around the world.

This last cable took the cascades of small “ice earthquakes”, some of them hundreds of feet, doctor fichtner and colleagues It was reported in journal science on Thursday.

Dr. Fichtner, this earthquakes began near the impurities in the ice. The place where these particles are sitting, the ice is weaker, more prone to crack. These cracks and slip and move along the cracks, create small seismic disorders.

This is not what scientists imagine in the deep ice piles covering the world’s polar areas. Typically, the ice thinks as you flows like syrup: slow, smooth, mouse.

But if the ice really moves like a single honey, Dr. Fichtner Cable would buy “Full Silence”. Instead, this “really really interesting events” wrote. “It was a surprise here.”

By sending laser beans via fiber-optic cable and measuring how they scattered, scientists can reset subtle movements along the entire length of the cable. It proved to be useful for monitoring of seismic activity, deep sea currents, glacier ice and more.

Dr. Fichtner in Greenland and a colleague, a cable dropped a billion mile from a cable, drilling to produce an ice core. There he slept 14 hours by collecting cable, vibrations.

If a cable wrap and emptiness does not look particularly difficult, Dr. Fichtner be the first to inform you: “Serious physical work”. BuruxHole, filled with a special vegetable oil to close, so the cable was slower to lay down the sink and back. Moreover, the subzero cold, the cable was brittle, that is, it was to handle with a lot of care.

Dr. Fichtner, when he began to look at the returning readings, he had to convince himself “they didn’t litter.” What if they show vibrations from the cable? Or, from the cracks that occur on the wall of the hole?

Over time, he and his team came to the conclusion that they wrote something internally for ice. Again, Dr. Fichtner, more measurements in more places, said scientists really said how often these earthquakes were in the ice sheets.

Enough measurements are a constantly problem for polar scientists, not participating in the new study, Engineering Professor Hélène Seroussi at the Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Oceanographers can collect data, and can throw the tools into the deep sea for hours in a few hours. Glacier researchers should dig deep into the ice, even years.

“Therefore, we continue to find all these new principles and mechanisms that look relatively fundamental,” Dr. Seroussi said. “Every time you learn a new observation, a new ice nucleus, a new way of size, a new thing.”

Andy Aschwanden, a glacialist at Alaska University, Dr. The discovery of the discovery of Fichtner and colleagues, offered an interesting idea for the subtleties of ice physics. However, it was still very early to know that scientists were very early to know how to better predict how the melting ice sheets of ice sheets would speed up the global sea levels. Dr. Aschwanden, Dr. Aschwanden said that ice still keeps other secrets, if it was not opened, more modeling is likely to improve.

New findings can help scientists to better understand the edges of ice sheets, Richard B. Khiyaban, Professor of Golocylvania at Pennsylvania State University.

According to Dr. Alley, the pre-existing flaws or damage in ice can cause rapidly after flowing from land and sea. Opening a fast-food ketchup package for the same reason, if you make it a small notch, but if you try to tear it to another place, it is very difficult, he said.

“We are all learning ice,” said Dr. Khiyaban, “One of us to be built on this new paper will come.”