New study reveals hundreds of hidden earthquakes are happening beneath Antarctica

Artificial intelligence is disrupting many fields by taking over many mundane, repetitive tasks. However, it is also a powerful tool to find hidden data that can go overlooked.

A whole lot of shaking going on beneath Antarctica

Such was the case for a group of researchers looking at data collected over the past two decades from nearly 50 seismic stations. The machines found roughly 1,000 earthquakes magnitude 1.6 to 3.5 that had happened beneath the David Glacier on Antarctica and previously been missed.

But perhaps more interesting was the location of the events, half of them occurred at depths between 60 and 90 miles below the surface and away from active plate boundaries, instead happening in the middle of the tectonic plate. The scientists observed in their study published in the journal Science that “they seemed tied to flexure and stress gradients around a boundary between the warm and cold lithosphere beneath West and East Antarctica, respectively.”

“The earthquakes occur where the cold, rigid crust and upper mantle beneath East Antarctica meets warmer, softer rock beneath West Antarctica,” University of Alabama geologist and lead author of the study, Long Ho, explained to Live Science. “This contrast creates an abrupt change in tectonic strength.”

Additionally, the earthquakes were confined to the section of mantle beneath David Glacier and not along the other mountains in the region suggesting there may be a role for glacial loading. Live Science points out that the 700-mile-long stretch of the David Glacier is a major outlet for the East Antarctica Ice Sheet, where 4% of its ice mass drains into the ocean.

Antarctica earthquakes may not be an outlier

Ho told Live Science that the team’s findings of so many earthquakes away from plate edges and at the boundary between the lithosphere and upper mantel may indicate that this is happening unnoticed around the world. If that were the case, it could have an impact on our current theories on plate tectonics.

“As machine-learning tools continue to improve, they could reveal that deep, continental-interior earthquakes are more common than currently recognized. If so, the role of such events within the plate tectonics framework may need to be re-evaluated,” Ho concluded.

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