Antarctica’s Hidden Earthquake Swarm Revealed — and Its Location Is Raising Questions

Antarctica is often imagined as frozen, silent, and geologically quiet, but new research has exposed a different story beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Using machine learning, scientists uncovered hundreds of previously hidden earthquakes beneath David Glacier, a major outlet glacier that stretches about 1,100 kilometres and drains roughly 4% of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet into the ocean.

The surprise is not only the number of earthquakes. It is where they are happening: deep beneath the continent, far from active plate boundaries, in a place where this kind of seismic activity was not expected. The findings were published in Science, and suggest Antarctica may be more tectonically active than earlier records showed.