00:00Pink granite boulders in Antarctica reveal 60-mile-wide stone giant after millennia.
00:06Pink granite boulders scattered across dark volcanic peaks in West Antarctica shouldn't exist.
00:12For decades, geologists stood baffled.
00:15How did rose-colored rocks end up high in the Hudson Mountains, miles from any visible granite source?
00:20The answer lay hidden nearly four miles beneath the ice, a colossal granite body rivaling whales.
00:26When British Antarctic Survey researchers solved this riddle, they uncovered far more than curiosity.
00:33How do scientists map structures buried beneath four miles of ice?
00:37Geophysicist Dr. Tom Jordan's team used airborne gravity measurements.
00:42Flying a twin-otter aircraft equipped with sensitive instruments across Pine Island Glacier,
00:46researchers detected gravitational anomalies revealing a massive buried granite body.
00:51The readings showed an enormous structure stretching nearly 100 kilometers 62 miles
00:57and plunging 7 kilometers into bedrock.
01:00This hidden granite giant is roughly half the size of whales.
01:04These granite boulders tell a story written 175 million years ago, during the age of dinosaurs.
01:10Radioactive elements locked within the pink granite allowed scientists to precisely date the rocks to the Jurassic period.
01:17That makes this buried giant older than most surrounding rock formations.
01:22The boulders collected from the surface matched the gravitational signatures of the buried granite body with striking precision,
01:28creating an unbreakable link between visible rocks and the hidden structure beneath the ice.
01:34Picture West Antarctica 20,000 years ago.
01:38The ice sheet was so thick it flowed across bedrock like a slow-moving river of frozen stone.
01:43As this ancient ice advanced, it tore fragments from the granite body below and carried them upward thousands of meters.
01:51Then, as earth warmed and ice retreated, those boulders were abandoned high in the Hudson Mountains.
01:58The discovery exemplifies how surface clues unlock vast geological secrets hidden beneath ice.
02:03Dr. Tom Jordan, the study's lead author, stated,
02:06It's remarkable that pink granite boulders spotted on the surface have led us to a hidden giant beneath the ice.
02:14By combining geological dating with gravity surveys, researchers solved a decades-old mystery about rock origins
02:20while uncovering new information about how ice flowed in the past and might behave in the future.
02:25The distribution of pink granite boulders across the Hudson Mountains reveals the exact pathways the ancient ice sheet took as it moved across bedrock.
02:34Scientists reconstructed ice flow patterns from 20,000 years ago using these natural clues.
02:39These flow patterns provide crucial constraints for computer models simulating Antarctic ice response to future warming.
02:46What happened in the distant past is the key to understanding what comes next.
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