The earthquakes began in August 2020 and subsided by November of that year. According to a new study, they
Similar "intrusions" of igneous rockwere observed in other places on Earth, but scientists first detected them in Antarctica. “Typically these processes occur on geological time scales rather than over human lifetimes. So in a way, we were lucky to see this,” study co-author Simone Ceska, a seismologist at the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam, told Live Science.
A series of earthquakes occurred around the underwaterMount Orca, an inactive volcano that rises 900 meters above the seabed. It lies in Bransfield Strait, a narrow passage between the South Shetland Islands and the northwestern tip of Antarctica. In this region, the Phoenix tectonic plate is subducting beneath the continental Antarctic plate, creating a network of fault zones, stretching some parts of the Earth's crust and opening cracks in others, according to a 2018 study published in the journal Polar Science.
Scientists at research stations on the islandKing George, one of the South Shetland Islands, was the first to feel the rumblings of small earthquakes. A team of experts wanted to understand what was happening, but King George Island is far from the epicenter, with only two seismic stations nearby.
Illustration of a seismically active zone off the coast of Antaktika.
(CC BY 4.0: Cesca et al. 2022; nature Commun Earth Environ 3, 89 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00418-5).
Image credit: Cesca et al. 2022, Communications Earth & Environment
Therefore, researchers used not onlyavailable data, but also indicators from two global satellite navigation system ground stations for measuring ground displacement. They also looked at data from more distant seismic stations and satellites orbiting the Earth that use radar to measure displacement at ground level. As a result, they calculated the total number of earthquakes; there were 85,000 of them. Scientists reported their findings in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
The two largest earthquakes in this seriesthere was a magnitude 5.9 earthquake in October 2020 and a magnitude 6.0 earthquake in November. After the November earthquake, seismic activity began to decline.
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