Never-before-seen shapes up to 1,300 feet long discovered beneath Antarctic ice

Scientists have discovered never-before-seen patterns beneath a floating ice shelf in Antarctica following an expedition to create the most detailed picture ever of the glacier's underside.

The strange teardrop shapes were discovered below Dotson Ice Shelf in West Antarctica in 2022, when a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) dove 10 miles (17 kilometers) underneath the glacier and Traveled more than 600 miles (1,000 km) along the underside of the ice.

The researchers published the findings of the first-of-its-kind survey Wednesday (July 31) in the journal Science Advances.

"In order to understand the ice cycle in Antarctica and how ice gets from the continent into the ocean we need to understand how it melts from beneath, a process that is equally important as calving for moving land ice to the ocean," study lead author Anna Wåhlin, a professor of oceanography at the University of Gothenburg, told Live Science.

Dotson Ice Shelf is a 30-mile-wide (50 km) chunk of floating ice seven times the size of New York City, located on the coast of Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica. It is part of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which has dramatically calving glaciers that could cause sea levels to rise by approximately 11 feet (3.4 m) if they eventually drive the entire sheet to collapse.

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Steady erosion is nibbling away at the fringes of the ice shelf, with warm ocean water infiltrating its undersides and unpinning it from the land, making its eventual collapse inevitable, previous studies showed.