The mysterious ice circles in the Arctic that intrigue NASA

The Operation IceBridge of NASA has been flying and mapping the ice of both poles for 15 years. But on April 14, John Sonntag, mission scientist, something he had never seen before.

"We saw these more or less circular issues only for a few minutes today," Sonntag said, according to a publication by the Earth Observatory of the US space agency.

"I do not remember seeing this kind of thing elsewhere," he added.

The scientist managed to take a picture from his window of the P-3 research plane while flying over the east of the Beaufort Sea, about 50 kilometers northwest of the Mackenzie River delta in Canada.

The objective was to observe the maritime ice of this area of the Arctic that only in 2013 began to be registered by this mission.

"However, the image aroused great intrigue, so we set out to see what we could find out," NASA acknowledged in that publication.

Ideas and speculations

Explaining a phenomenon based only on a photograph or satellite image is not easy, said NASA.

Therefore, instead, he offered some "ideas and speculations" about the strange circles of ice provided by researchers from the space agency as well as scientists from other institutes who sent their theories.

According to Don Perovich, a geophysicist of maritime ice at the American university Dartmouth College, the only clear thing is that it is ice "thin, soft and, in some way, malleable".

Nathan Kurtz, Operation IceBridge scientist, agreed that it is an area of thin ice, but clarified: "I'm not sure what kind of dynamics the semicircle shapes that surround the holes could generate, I've never seen anything like it before."

I'm not sure what kind of dynamics the semicircle shapes that surround the holes could generate. I've never seen anything like that before ".
Nathan Kurtz, NASA Operation IceBridge scientist.

On the intriguing holes, a theory of NASA is that they were created by seals seeking outlets to breathe.

The maritime ice scientist at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory of the US government, Chris Polashenski, added that it could also be due to a convection process, that is, heat transfer.

For his part, Chris Shuman of the University of Maryland, in the United States, estimated: "There are many possibilities that this is simply 'hot springs' or filtrations of groundwater that flow from the mountains and that arise in this particular area".