Ice sheets can melt much faster than we thought
The Agulhas II, the ship used to image the ridges (Courtesy Julian Dowdeswell/)In the past couple of decades, we’ve had satellites trained on Earth’s ice sheets, documenting climate change-induced losses. But those years are a small sample when it comes to understanding the range of behavior these frozen areas can exhibit over the eons of geologic time.That’s why glacial geologists are now looking underwater to learn more about ice sheets. Just like glaciers have carved the land, leaving behind features like valleys and boulder fields, geologists have suspected that ice shelves along the ocean could do the same to the seafloor. Now, with new sonar technology to map seabeds, it’s possible to see those features. On the Larsen continental shelf off Antarctica, researchers have used underwater drones to image a series of ripples across the seafloor. A new study in Science finds that these ripples reveal that an ancient glacier...