Why Does This Glacier Near Everest Make Loud Booming Sounds at Night?

[Judi Lynn]

By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | October 17, 2018 12:14pm ET

At night, they heard a noise. While a team of scientists camped on the Trakarding-Trambau Glacier system near Mount Everest in the Nepalese Himalayas, it rumbled through their tents — the alarming sound of ice snapping and cracking beneath them.

And the researchers figured out why: At night in the Himalayas, the temperature would drop sharply, by dozens of degrees. In a paper published Aug. 29 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers showed that when temperatures dropped sharply at night, the booming, eerie noises were more intense. And it was concentrated in regions where wind had cleared snow and debris from the ice surface, exposing the glacier to the air.

"Local ice turns out to be very sensitive to this high rate of change," Evgeny Podolskiy, a glaciologist at the Arctic Research Center in Hokkaido University, in Japan, and lead author of the paper, said in a statement. [Time-Lapse Images of Retreating Glaciers]

During the day, the ice is quiet and still. But after sunset, the scientists wrote, temperature changes likely cause exposed ice to shrink, fracturing it as individual regions warp away from one another. The cracks aren't necessarily visible from the surface, but the noises they make were loud enough to keep the research team up at night, according to the statement.

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[2naSalit]

1. Just as I imagined when I read the title.

It is interesting though I had suspected, as well, that melting would produce the same if not similar effect.