In the myths of all peoples, information about a worldwide catastrophe that led to the death of ancient civilizations has been preserved. But what was she connected with? Scientists put forward different hypotheses. The most popular among them are: the fall of a large meteorite, the simultaneous awakening of volcanoes across the entire surface of the planet, a catastrophic shift of the earth's axis. But there is one more hypothesis that almost never made it onto the pages of newspapers. But it is she who seems the most real. This is the "Big Antarctic Bang" hypothesis.
Killer icebergs
Antarctic glaciers are the greatest in the world. The southern ice cap of the Earth contains about 30 million cubic kilometers of ice. If you melt all this ice, then the level of the World Ocean will rise by 100 meters! Many glaciers would be more correct to be called ice streams, since they do not have clearly defined boundaries. Where the glacier flows into the bay and reaches the coast, the ice floats and ice shelves are formed. The largest of these is the Ross Glacier. But the thickest should be considered the Ratford Glacier. It is over 1.6 kilometers thick, and it is here that the most powerful floating ice forms. The largest iceberg in the entire history of observations in Antarctica was named B15. For two and a half years, he was locked in the Ross Sea. The size of the iceberg is comparable, for example, to the island of Jamaica. Its area was about 11 thousand square kilometers. When the "southern spring" came, B15 split first into two parts, then into nine.
A little time passed, and another giant iceberg, more than 200 kilometers long, separated from the continental part of Antarctica and began to drift. According to experts, it poses a serious danger to navigation in those parts. With the help of an artificial satellite of the Earth, another huge ice floe was discovered, albeit of a smaller size, “only” 75 kilometers long!
The navigation season begins, and colossal icebergs become a mortal obstacle to the approach of icebreakers and cargo ships to Antarctica. But ships are at even greater risk because of the gigantic debris - numerous smaller icebergs, the number of which has increased dramatically over the past three years and which can become "killers" of ships plowing southern latitudes. These "killers" have been monitored by artificial earth satellites for 26 years.
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Ice "mines"
The easiest way would be to associate the appearance of killer icebergs with the general warming of the climate. Recently, everything has been falling on him: droughts in Spain, floods in Germany, frosts in the European part of Russia and fires in Asia. The American scientists are most seriously concerned with the problem of the increase in the number of floating ice mountains entering the oceans from Antarctica, but they just think that this issue is not related to global warming, although they cannot explain the reason for the unprecedented frequency of icebergs appearing in recent years.
But if not a warming of the climate, then what increases the rate of formation of icebergs, and how can this threaten humanity?
Huge geological stresses accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years are capable of literally blowing up a four-kilometer ice mass from the inside. Real ice "mines" appear here. They need a fuse to explode, and it exists. These are areas of ancient faults that have been activated recently. Literally millimeter shifts in rocks can lead to catastrophic processes in the body of glaciers. The most abundant discharge of icebergs into the ocean is in the zones of two giant faults that run near the Ross Ice Shelf and off the coast of the Weddell Sea. These are the main “iceberg-forming” regions of Antarctica. The tension of the lines of force in the ice crust of these places, as recorded by geophysical instruments, has already reached critical levels.
But if the activation of the faults only contributes to an increase in the number of icebergs breaking away from the ice shelves, then a strong "shaking" effect on the ice continent may be different: a meteorite fall, an earthquake or nuclear tests in the Pacific Ocean. Ice cover in places where ice shelves descend into the sea can move. Scientists have already dubbed the hypothetical catastrophe the Great Antarctic Explosion.
Under the ice - fresh water lakes
The consequences for the entire planet can be unprecedented - about five to six cubic kilometers of ice will become icebergs dumped into the waters of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
In the worst case scenario for mankind, this process of "icebergs falling" will take about 50 years. As soon as the Ross Ice Shelf begins to crumble, the water level in the oceans will rise by about five to ten centimeters a year. And as icebergs move into warm latitudes, this rise will accelerate due to the rapid melting of ice.
In addition, the rate of sliding of glaciers into the ocean can be influenced by another, not so long ago discovered property of the ice cover of Antarctica. Its radiophysical sounding made it possible to identify - first in the area of the Russian station "Vostok", and then in other places - subglacial fresh water lakes. The dimensions of the lake under Vostok station are approximately 800 by 200 kilometers, and it extends between the base of the glacier and the rocks of the Antarctic continent. Thus, ice here can slide along the surface of the water, as if on lubricant. The presence of subglacial lakes makes it possible to speak with even greater confidence about the possible centrifugal spreading of ice and its collapse into the ocean.
Within a few years after the Great Antarctic Explosion, due to the abundance of floating ice blocks, maritime navigation in the southern seas will be practically paralyzed.
It is alarming that we, it turns out, "have already passed this", and the sharp melting of the coastal glaciers of Antarctica has already led to catastrophic planetary floods.
A global flood in our day?
According to scientists, in half a century the level of the World Ocean can rise by 20 meters. Low-lying coastal areas will be flooded, and there are about seven percent of the entire land area of the Earth. Moreover, it is these lands that make up a quarter of all cultivated arable land. Some countries, such as Holland, will have no place at all on the world map. The consequences of these seemingly "regional" floods will be comparable to a planetary catastrophe.
The biblical theme of the Flood has been preserved in the memory of mankind, according to experts, due to local floods in places densely populated by people, in the same, for example, the valley of Mesopotamia. But it is quite possible that the reason for such evidence could have been flooding of coastal plains caused by the previous Antarctic explosion. Studies of sedimentary rocks in such areas show that about 10 thousand years ago, the Earth already experienced a similar catastrophe.
Confirmation that the Flood was caused by icebergs was a study conducted several years ago related to ozone holes. Scientists have discovered ozone-depleting substances in the geological layers of the Earth, which arose long before the advent of freon technologies. It is believed that the source of these substances is in one of the extinct volcanoes of Antarctica, and traces of it have been recorded in some places along the coast of Africa. Moreover, this ash could not have been brought by winds and rains, otherwise it would have fallen evenly over a large area. And here the ash with ozone-depleting substances formed concentrated spots, which clearly proves its Antarctic footprint - it settled where icebergs were melting.
The most unpleasant thing about the hypothesis of the Big Antarctic Explosion is the forecast that such explosions will occur on the southern continent periodically, about once every 10 thousand years, when the ice crust accumulates enough energy to "disturb".
E. Reshetnikov