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In the winter ice crusting over the Antarctic Weddell Sea, near a submerged peak named Maud Rise, a huge hole sometimes opens and gapes, exposing the dark, cold waters below. First spotted in 1974, it doesn't appear every year, leading scientists to wonder about the specific conditions needed to produce it.
Farther out to sea, they're far less common. In fact, the recurring hole known as the Maud Rise polynya has had scientists scratching their heads since it was first spotted in a satellite image half a century ago. The Maud Rise polynya of 2017 marked the largest and longest-lived example of the phenomenon since the 1970s, so scientists got to work. A compilation of the data, collected by the aforementioned sources, revealed that a number of different factors contributed, and all needed to line up in just the right way to produce the polynya.
Salt can significantly lower the freezing point of water, so if the water in the polynya is particularly saline, that could explain the hole's persistence. So the team went back to the data, as well as computational models of the ocean, to figure out where the additional salt came from.
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