Antarctic icequakes do occur occasionally, but not very often. This recent study is proof of this. According to US study reports by scientists Sunday, Chile's 2010 monster earthquake also let loose minor Antarctic icequakes, a location nearly 4 700 kilometres to the south of Chile.
According to News Tonight Africa, the seismic waves from the Feb. 27, 2010 earthquake in Chile, triggered Antarctic icequakes and tremors, rupturing the ice sheets located nearly 4,700 kilometers to the south.
The 2010 Chile quake measured 8.8 in magnitude, making it one of the largest ever recorded in history. It occurred just off the coast of Chile's Maule region.
The Chile mega-quake killed more than 500 people and caused damages estimated to be worth $30-billion. It also reportedly triggered mirco-quakes in North America's tectonically active regions, as well as Antarctic icequakes, which has been discovered only now.
The AFP reports that the first evidence of the Antarctic icequakes - which shows that the world's greatest ice sheet can be affected by distant but powerful quakes - were captured by sensors in West Antarctica.
Apparently, it has been a long mystery with geologists how ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica - whose underlying rock are seismically peaceful - would respond to far off but gigantic quakes.
Previously, it is already known that large earthquakes can trigger seismic activity in remote parts of the Earth's crust, but the recent results from the study of Antarctic icequakes show that ice sheets are also sensitive to such events.
According to News Tonight Africa, ice-quakes, or the Antarctic icequakes for this matter, are seismic trembling caused by sudden movement within a glacier or ice sheet.
Independent website Value Walk said that a few years back, there was hardly a method to identify Antarctic icequakes, but with the advancement in technology, new tools are made available. These tools include small network sensors which can be deployed near and on the top of the ice sheets.
It was a team of scientists from the journal Nature Geoscience who reported that 12 out of 42 monitoring stations dotted across the Antarctic show apparent evidence of spike in high-frequency seismic signals. The signals, they said, matched with signs of ice fractures near the surface.
Associate Professor Zhigang Peng at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta told the AFP about the Antarctic icequakes in an email exchange.
Peng said, 'The best bet is that the tremors came from movement within the ice sheet itself, and not from any fault in the bedrock below.'
He continued, 'While we are not 100-percent sure, we think that those seismic signals come from ice cracking within the ice sheet, likely very close to the surface.'
He added, 'The main reason is that if those seismic signals were associated with faulting beneath the ice sheet, they would be similar to earthquakes at other tectonically active regions.'
Value Walk reports that the paper on the Antarctic icequakes concluded that large sheets of ice can respond to a far away strong earthquakes. However, they said that there is still much work to be done in the direction.
Antarctic icequakes may be far from everyone's mind right now, and many might see little relevance in the study. But what is the study's significance?
Dr. Jake Walter, co-author of the study, said in the ABC Science report, 'This tells us something new about the way the Earth works, and potentially changes our understanding of the way earthquakes proliferate into ice fields.'
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
