Glaciologists at the University of California, Irvine have found the deepest point of Earth’s continents in Queen Mary Land, East Antarctica. This canyon, buried under the ice of the Denman Glacier, reaches 3.5km (11,500ft) below sea level. The finding seems critical for understanding how the polar south might change in the future.
Crux of the Matter
This discovery was presented as the BedMachine Antarctica Project, at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
Using microwave pulses, the project compiled a preliminary map of the underlying bedrock, passing through the thick ice covering most of the continent.
Dr. Mathieu Morlighem, who has been part of the 6 year long project, explained how trenches in the oceans are cavernous, but this is the deepest canyon on land.
So even though Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, is still the deepest point on Earth with 36,037 feet (10.9 kilometers), it is geologically speaking part of the oceanic crust.
The Irvine team plans to feed the project into climate models, which would project how the continent might evolve, as temperatures increase on Earth in times ahead.
This would further measure the possibility of destabilization of floating shelves of ice, which in turn could speed up the flow of speeding glaciers.
Curiopedia
Canyon or a gorge is a deep cleft between escarpments or cliffs resulting from weathering and the erosive activity of a river over geologic timescales. Gorges within mountains that have an opening on only one side, are called box canyons while steep-sided valley formations in the seabed of the continental slope are referred to as submarine canyons. More Info
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