Scientists in Antarctica have made some cool discoveries! Margaret shares some recent discoveries from Antarctica, including a strange sea cucumber named the headless chicken monster, and a recording of the eerie sound of ice melting.
Class Discussion Questions:
1) Why is it important for scientists to monitor sea ice?
2) Rename the headless chicken monster. What would you name it and why?
Read the Script:
Brr, I am the type of person who gets cold pretty easily, especially in the winter or just when someone puts the AC too low. But our frigid temps are nothing compared to the coldest place on Earth. I'm talking about Antarctica. Recently, scientists have made some pretty cool discoveries there. Cool, get it? Okay, bad joke, but I've got some good science.
Most of what you find in Antarctica is ice, ice and more ice. Which might seem kind of boring, but actually, this ice can give us a lot of information about our Earth. One discovery is how the ice sheet covering Antarctica is changing over time.
You can see in this NASA video that the ice altered quite a bit between 2002 and 2016. The yellow and orange areas show where the ice has melted, while the light blue is where it grew. In this time period, it's estimated that 125-gigatons of ice was lost each year. Now giga- is a prefix meaning billion. So a gigaton is one billion tons and one billion tons of water can fill 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
If you add all of that melted ice to the oceans around the world, the sea level rises, causing coastal areas to flood and harming the plants and animals that grow in these special ecosystems.
When you think about the ice here, you probably envision icebergs something looking like this, not the cubes in your drinking glass. So here's our next discovery. Yep, it's a real iceberg in Antarctica and it's really rectangular. Looks fake, huh?
The photo was captured by NASA Scientist Jeremy Harbeck during an aerial survey of the Northern Antarctic Peninsula. The surprising shape caught the attention of thousands of people who re-Tweeted the image on Twitter.
Here you can see the full shape of the iceberg. It's not a perfect rectangle, but still pretty close.
These fly-over missions let scientists see changes in the ice up close. But what about hearing the changes? Take a listen to this.
That humming sound is powerful winds blowing through the snow dunes of Antarctica's largest ice shelf. An ice shelf is basically a huge chunk of ice that floats on the water, but is also attached to land. Kind of like an icy overhang from the continent.
American Geophysical Union scientists buried seismic sensors in the Ross Ice Shelf and wound up with an eerie song. They say the sound is caused by the vibration of the snow on top of the ice shelf when the wind blows through it.
Now, they are working on using the noise to help determine changes in the Antarctic. For example, they may be able to use the sounds as a warning signal for when the ice is likely to break apart. While an ice shelf splitting off doesn't cause the sea level to change, since it's already floating on the water, it does make it easier for the rest of the ice left on land to follow its example. And that can cause sea level rise.
Okay, one last discovery, 'cause if you think that sound is a little creepy, you have got to see this one. A creature that scientists recently caught on camera, swimming around the Antarctic waters. It's called the Headless Chicken Monster.
I'd say the name is pretty accurate. It's half-scary, but also kind of adorable, maybe because it's pink and purple and squishy. This odd guy is a sea cucumber. It feeds on organic material that it scoops off the ocean floor with its little tentacle feet.
The Headless Chicken spends most of its time swimming about, propelled by its webbed-tentacle veil. This is only the second time one has been caught on camera. Australia's scientists had been studying the waters off Antarctica to see where companies should avoid fishing. Now they're thinking since this guy is so rare, fishers should probably keep away.
Ice cube icebergs, squishy sea monsters and humming snow dunes, the Antarctic shows us that there is always something new to discover, even in the coldest place on Earth.