Atlantic ice shelf ‘sings’ eerie song

The hills are alive with the sound of music—or at least one massive Antarctic ice shelf is alive with a peculiar tune. Scientists initially installed 34 seismic sensors under the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf to track the ice’s movement and structure over the course of 2 years. But when they later analyzed the data, they found the shelf was humming, and the pitch changed depending on how winds were whipping across the snow dunes on the ice’s surface, Earther reports. Listening for changes to the hum could indicate how the shelf is responding to changing weather conditions and whether it’s in danger of cracking, the researchers report this week in Geophysical Research Letters.

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Image Credit:  Michael Van Woert

The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf of Antarctica (as of 2013 an area of roughly 500,809 square kilometres (193,363 sq mi) and about 800 kilometres (500 mi) across: about the size of France).

It is several hundred metres thick. The nearly vertical ice front to the open sea is more than 600 kilometres (370 mi) long, and between 15 and 50 metres (50 and 160 ft) high above the water surface. Ninety percent of the floating ice, however, is below the water surface.

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Image Credit: Michael Van Woert

The Ross Ice Shelf at the Bay of Whales. Research Vessel Ice Breaker (RVIB) NATHANIEL B. PALMER in the background.

"The mystic Barrier" at Bay of Whales, near where Amundsen first encountered it Note humans for size comparison (dark spots next to the large chunk of sea ice at left image border)

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Take a listen to the sounds scientists discovered near the Antarctic ice shelves.

Using special instruments, scientists have discovered weird sounds at the bottom of the world. The noise is actually vibrating ice, caused by the wind blowing across snow dunes, according to a new study.

“It's kind of like you're blowing a flute, constantly, on the ice shelf,” study lead author Julien Chaput, a geophysicist and mathematician at Colorado State University, said in a statement.

Another scientist, glaciologist Douglas MacAyeal of the University of Chicago, likened the sounds to the buzz of thousands of cicadas. The sounds are too low in frequency to be heard by human ears unless sped up by the monitoring equipment.