Beneath the Antarctic ice, scientists find remnants of a giant river system that flowed for thousands of miles
Geologists digging into the massive ice sheet of West Antarctica have discovered the remains of an ancient river system that once flowed for nearly a thousand miles."If we think about a potentially severe climate change in the future, we need to learn from periods in Earth's history where this already happened,", study co-author and a sedimentologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, told Live Science..
But uncovering the past has proven challenging. Most of West Antarctica today is covered in ice, making it difficult to access sedimentary rocks, which are critical to studying early environments. Geologists often rely on the type of grains, minerals and fossils trapped within these sediments to work out the kind of conditions that characterize an area.
By calculating the half-life of radioactive elements, such as the ratio of uranium and lead in the sediment, they found that the lower part of the sediment was formed during the mid-. The upper part of the sediment contained mostly sand from the mid-to-late Eocene epoch, about 30 million to 40 million years ago.
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Giant river system that existed 40 million years ago discovered deep below Antarctic iceKristel is a science writer based in the U.S. with a doctorate in chemistry from the University of New South Wales, Australia. She holds a master's degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work has appeared in Drug Discovery News, Science, Eos and Mongabay, among other outlets.
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