NASA researchers have found mysterious holes in the Arctic ice and can only speculate on what led to their creation. Some think they were made by seals. Some think they are related to warmer water under the ice.
John Sonntag, a mission scientist with NASA's annual Operation IceBridge, spotted the holes April 14 about 50 miles northwest of Canada's Mackenzie River Delta while flying over the eastern Beaufort Sea, NASA said.
"We saw these sorta-circular features only for a few minutes today," Sonntag wrote from the field. "I don't recall seeing this sort of thing elsewhere."
NASA said interest in the circles is mostly curiosity but has still generated a lot of attention, leading to plenty of speculation.
"The encircling features may be due to waves of water washing out over the snow and ice when the seals surface," theorized Walt Meier, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. "Or it could be a sort of drainage feature that results from when the hole is made in the ice."
Chris Polashenski, a sea ice scientist at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, told NASA the circles could be breathing holes for seals or something caused by convection.
"This is in pretty shallow water generally, so there is every chance this is just 'warm springs' or seeps of ground water flowing from the mountains inland that make their presence known in this particular area," said Chris Shuman, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County glaciologist based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
"The other possibility is that warmer water from Beaufort currents or out of the Mackenzie River is finding its way to the surface due to interacting with the bathymetry, just the way some polynyas form," Shuman added.
The Guardian reported this month that the Arctic ice has receded due to a warming atmosphere at a rate not seen in at least 1,500 years. NASA calculated that the ice is disappearing by about 13 percent a decade and could completely disappear by the 2040s.
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