Scientists Discover Weird Sounds In Antarctic Ice Shelf

pgmrdlm shares a report from USA Today: 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. The scientists originally buried 34 seismic sensors under the snow on Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf to study the continent's ice shelves -- not to record the sounds they heard. 'Studying the vibrations of an ice shelf's insulating snow jacket could give scientists a sense of how it is responding to changing climate conditions,' reports USA Today. 'Changes to the ice shelf's 'seismic hum' could also indicate whether cracks in the ice are forming that might indicate whether the ice shelf is susceptible to breaking up.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.