When a glacier meets the sea, vast chunks of ice can split from its terminus and crash into the water below. Those spectacular events are not the only source of glacial sound. Even when glacial ice merely melts on contact with seawater, millimeter-sized pores of pressurized air that are trapped in the ice wriggle noisily free to form bubbles that float to the surface. Erin Pettit of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and her collaborators have measured, both in the field and in the lab, the noise made by the escaping air. Their finding: Melting ice is the predominant source of ambient noise in glacial fjords. To reach that conclusion, Pettit’s team first set up hydrophones in three glacial fjords: Icy Bay and Yakutat Bay in Alaska and Andvord Bay in Antarctica. They found that the time-averaged acoustic spectrum in all three locations featured a broad peak between 1...
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1 May 2015
May 01 2015
Citation
Charles Day; Glaciers melt noisily into the sea. Physics Today 1 May 2015; 68 (5): 19. https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.2771
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