Comment by gaborcselle
6 months ago
Key quotes:
“The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,” said Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics who worked on the ANITA team searching for signals from elusive particles called neutrinos.
“My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don't fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven't been able to find any of those yet either,” Wissel said. “So, right now, it's one of these long-standing mysteries, and I'm excited that when we fly PUEO, we'll have better sensitivity. In principle, we should pick up more anomalies, and maybe we'll actually understand what they are. We also might detect neutrinos, which would in some ways be a lot more exciting.”
My read of this (I am a physicist by training) is that they’re possibly picking up radio emissions from triboelectric effects due to the enormous shear forces in a slowly motile ice sheet grinding over a quartz rich (east Antarctica has a high quartz concentration) substrate.
We’re talking about cubic kilometres of ice, moving jerkily with stick-slip motion over bedrock - the potentials generated would likely be in the megavolt range.
It would also explain the 30 degree incidence, as you’d expect the signal to refract within the ice and exit at a shallow angle.
In their shoes, I would be looking for correlation with seismographic events and high res GPS ice flow monitoring, not other neutrino observatories - it would seem wise to me to eliminate known physical effects as causes before invoking exotic matter.
>the potentials generated would likely be in the megavolt range.
I disagree, what we're talking here is much more than mere MEGAVOLTS what we are talking here are orders of magnitude in the JIGAWATT RANGE!!!
Are these the kind of high voltage events potentially near geothermal vents that are one of the leading explanations for biogenesis?
We suspect a geothermal vent in a high-phosphorus soda lake, exposed to UV sunlight. There's one in Canada with just about the right mix of everything needed.
https://www.science.org/content/article/unusual-soda-lakes-m...
I really have no idea, but if that’s a topic that interests you I can wholeheartedly recommend Nick Lane’s “The Vital Question”.