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A Vast Underground Water System Helps Drive Antarctica’s Glaciers
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Gregory Barber

Science
May 5, 2022 2:00 PM


A VAST UNDERGROUND WATER SYSTEM HELPS DRIVE ANTARCTICA’S GLACIERS

Scientists have finally found Antarctica’s missing groundwater, which will help
them predict ice flows on the continent.
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Photograph: DE AGOSTINI PICTURE LIBRARY/Getty Images

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Lake Whillans is a strange body of water, starting with the fact that there is
liquid to fill it at all. Though buried under more than 2,000 feet of Antarctic
ice, its temperatures climb to just shy of 0 degrees Celsius, thanks to a
combination of geothermal warmth, intense friction from ice scraping rock, and
that thick glacial blanket protecting it from the polar air. Given the immense
pressure down there, that’s just balmy enough to keep the lake’s water watery.
Stranger still, Lake Whillans is also teeming with life. One survey a decade ago
found thousands of varieties of microscopic critters, thought to be feeding on
nutrients left by seawater that sloshed into the basin several millennia ago,
when the glaciers last pulled back.

More recently, Chloe Gustafson, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, arrived on the remote stretch of ice above Lake Whillans with a
different mystery in mind: What’s happening underneath that lake? Antarctic
researchers had long suspected the plumbing below the glacier went much deeper
than they could see. Any groundwater beneath the lake would have implications
for how the ice up above moves oceanward, and thus for how quickly it might
contribute to rising seas. But they couldn’t definitively prove what groundwater
was there. It was too deep, too ice-covered to map with the traditional tools of
glaciology, like bouncing radar signals off the ice or setting off explosives
and listening to the shockwaves.

In a study published in the journal Science, Gustafson’s team offers a
long-awaited schematic of the watery world underneath the ice. A vast reservoir
of groundwater reaches more than a kilometer below subglacial water features
like Lake Whillans, containing 10 times as much water. To see it, the
researchers turned to a technique called magnetotellurics, or MT, which
harnesses natural variations in Earth’s electromagnetic field to sketch out a
broad picture of the sediment below. They expect that similar groundwater
systems underpin other areas where the ice is flowing fast—so-called ice streams
that account for about 90 percent of the ice making its way from the continent’s
interior to the ocean. “This is one piece of the puzzle asking why this ice
flows the way it does,” says Gustafson. “So it’s really important for
understanding what’s going to happen to Antarctica.”



Scientists have long understood that subglacial water plays a role in how the
ice above it moves. One factor is how it alters the sediment below, creating
ruts and planes on the terrain. Another is by lubricating the ground, which
allows the ice to slide more quickly. “If you have water on a Slip ’n Slide,
you’re going to slide pretty quickly,” Gustafson says. “If you don’t have water,
you’re not going to get very far.” Making sense of that subglacial hydrology is
especially important for researchers racing to model particularly precarious
regions of ice, like the Thwaites Glacier, a few hundred miles away from
Whillans. In January, a group of researchers reported that Thwaites—the
so-called Doomsday Glacier, which holds back enough ice to raise global sea
levels by 2 feet—could collapse within five years.

But without groundwater, those models are incomplete. Researchers had long
observed that more water was spilling out from underneath the Whillans ice
stream than expected, says Slawek Tulaczyk, a professor of earth sciences at UC
Santa Cruz who studies the region but wasn’t involved in the research. This was
strange. As ice sheets approach the ocean, they tend to get thinner and thus
less good at insulating the ground from the frigid Antarctic air. At these
edges, water should tend to freeze, slowing down the movement of the ice. But
that wasn’t what glaciologists were seeing. “This was the conundrum,” he says.
Somehow, the patterns they observed were “thwarting thermodynamics.” The
researchers hypothesized that nearly half of that water must be rising up from
unmapped sources underground.



Gustafson’s team set out to map it. The ice above Lake Whillans is in the west
part of the Antarctic, at the foot of the sheer Transantarctic peaks that divide
the continent. The area gained favor with scientists conducting research in the
pre-GPS era because those mountains helped as navigational aids. But it’s
remote. “It was the longest, most grueling camping trip of my life,” Gustafson
says of the weeks spent trudging around the snow and ice, digging out holes
where the team would leave devices that passively listen for electromagnetic
signals. The instruments would sit there for 24 hours before the researchers dug
them up and moved them to the next site two kilometers away.

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Thwaites Glacier



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MT involves using electromagnetic waves produced by a variety of sources—from
the high-frequency sources like lightning to the low-frequency undulations of
solar wind. As these electromagnetic waves penetrate Earth’s crust, they wobble
depending on how well they are conducted, allowing scientists to study what
kinds of materials lie below. Typically, geologists use MT to look deep into the
lithosphere—tens of kilometers below Earth’s surface—to study bedrock and
geological faults; oil and gas engineers have used MT to map out energy reserves
in the seafloor. But more recently, the technique has proven useful to Antarctic
researchers looking to take a peek under ice. Gustafson’s team was especially
interested in shallower measurements—about 1 kilometer deep. In the data, she
could see the crackling of lightning storms on distant continents.



After the team analyzed the data, a more complete picture of the Antarctic’s
continental depths emerged. The results suggested that the deepest groundwater
is the saltiest, roughly the same salinity as seawater, and that it becomes less
salty nearer the surface. This likely means that groundwater is being exchanged
with the fresh meltwater found in the subglacial lakes and channels above it.
That may help explain why there’s so much life in places like Lake Whillans.
“Groundwater moving within the sediments can move carbon along with it,
providing fuel for these microbes,” Gustafson says. That raises tantalizing
possibilities for what sort of life might be clinging on in other parts of the
continent, she adds.

That exchange also means groundwater is playing a role in the Slip ’n Slide. “We
haven’t been looking at it hard enough,” says Winnie Chu, a glaciologist at
Georgia Institute of Technology who wasn’t involved in the research. Groundwater
adds a potential dose of uncertainty to models predicting the flow of ice, she
explains. As the Antarctic warms, those vast reservoirs may be able to soak up
the melt occurring at the base of glaciers—potentially slowing the impact of
rising temperatures. Or they might start releasing more water as the ice above
thins out, easing pressure on the sediment. “Now that we can see it, we can move
on to the next stage and ask whether the groundwater aquifer has actually been
affecting Whillans ice stream velocity,” Chu says. “That will help us build
better models, especially for prediction.”

The data around Whillans is a good start for answering those questions,
Gustafson notes, because it’s “rather boring” in terms of ice movement—that is,
although fast-moving, the ice is pretty stable, not gaining or losing mass. That
makes it a good baseline for future groundwater studies in places like Thwaites,
where researchers are racing to build more complete models of ice movement in a
decidedly less-boring region. Researchers are planning MT experiments there
later this year.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Gregory Barber is a staff writer at WIRED covering energy and the environment.
He graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor’s degree in computer
science and English literature and now lives in San Francisco.
Staff Writer
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TopicsAntarcticaEarth Sciencewaterclimate change




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