Image - Twitter / David App
Things are happening in Antarctica that, although they are completely natural, since climate change is a phenomenon that humans are worsening due to the way they treat planet Earth, they are events that concern us.
The latest news is the discovery of a huge hole off the coast of the Weddell Sea in Antarctica that has stunned scientists.
Open water areas such as the one found, surrounded by sea ice, form in the coastal regions of Antarctica and in the Arctic. Known polynyas, can appear in two ways: by a thermodynamic process, which occurs when the surface temperature of the water never reaches the freezing point; either by the action of the katabatic wind or ocean currents, which carry the ice away from the fixed border of permanent ice.
The strange thing about the polynya seen off the coast of Antarctica is that it's deep in the polar cap. According to scientists, it has been formed through processes for which they still have no explanation. Could it have been climate change? It's still too early to tell, but one of the causes is believed to be the melting of sea ice as a consequence of the warm water of the Antarctic Ocean.
Image - MODIS-Aqua via NASA Worldview
The last time anything similar could be observed in the Weddel Sea area was in the 1970s, but there were no adequate tools to study it at the time. Now, thanks to satellites and robots submerged deep in the sea, experts can analyze them. Thus, they have been able to find out that today's polynya measures about 80.000 square kilometers, a size slightly larger than the territory of Panama.
For more information, we recommend visiting the page of the University of Toronto, to which the scientist Kent Moore belongs, one of the researchers of the phenomenon, doing click here.