When it comes to earthquakes, Antarctica has always been the calm, frozen outlier. Most of the planet’s shaking occurs where tectonic plates grind against each other, and Antarctica is in the middle of one giant plate, far from those messy edges. That reputation just received a blow. In a new study published in the journal Science, researchers used artificial intelligence to comb through two decades of old seismic data, uncovering more than 500 previously unreported earthquakes lurking beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And they were not where anyone expected to find them.
The story turns things around for an American audience accustomed to hearing about earthquakes in California or Alaska. According to the same Science study, these quakes occurred about 60 to 90 miles down, beneath a massive river of ice called the David Glacier, which stretches nearly 700 miles and dumps about 4 percent of the entire East Antarctic Ice Sheet into the ocean.
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