Antarctica ice mass growing from the bottom up

March 4, 2011 – ANTARCTICA – Studies of under-ice lakes in Antarctica first alerted scientists to the capability of pooled melt-water to refreeze on the bottom of ice sheets and deform the upper layers. But this accretion ice was considered an anomaly “a weird thing that happened over sub-glacial lakes,” not over the entire ice sheet, Antarctic geophysicist Robin E. Bell of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory told Discovery News. But in examining bright spots found at the bottom of the Antarctic ice sheet, Bell and colleagues have since discovered water is interacting with over a quarter of the bottom of the ice sheet – freezing and pushing the entire ice sheet up in a way that is surprisingly similar to the lake effect. “In fact, I’d forgotten the connection until last night,” she said in an interview today. The new discovery is adding an unknown dimension to the overall layer-cake growth model for ice sheets: that ice sheets gain height one layer at a time as the amount of snow falling on the top outpaces the amount of ice melting at the bottom. Bell and her team using ice-penetrating radar atop Antarctica have just turned this idea upside down. “In some places up to half the ice thickness has been added from below,” Bell and her international team of colleagues, reported in the new issue of the online journal Sciencexpress. “The addition of 100’s of meters ice to the base of an ice sheet deforms the overlying ice upward,” writes Bell. “This upwarping modifies the ice sheet stratigraphy and may impact the surface accumulation by changing the surface slope.” “It’s an extremely important observation for us because this is potentially lifting the very oldest ice off the bed,” geologist Jeff Severinghaus of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego who was not involved in the study said in a press release. The lifting he said could either better preserve the older ice higher up in the ice sheet, or “make it harder to interpret the record, if it’s shuffled like a deck of cards.” –Discovery News

  

Telemetry data of seismic anomalies detected under Antarctica on March 4, 2011

Besides the growing imbalance of mass distribution of weight of the South pole sheet now dragging on planetary angular momentum, I described the dangers of this  ice accretion process at Antarctica prior to this report in my book in the chapter of Are we heading for a Pole Shift: “As more methane is released in an Arctic permafrost melt; the atmosphere warms more. The positive feedback accelerates the sublimation process further. The Arctic Ice sheet’s albedo ratio diminishes as the size of the Arctic ice cap shrinks. The whole runaway process compromises the system further. At the other end of the pole; nearly the opposite effect occurs. Plunging temperatures increases the density of the Antarctica ice-shelf and the danger rises not from sublimation but from massive fracturing and seismic slippage of large ice sheets as sub-glacial volcanism intensifies.” page 142-143, The Extinction Protocol.     (c) Copyright