If you have ever read At the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft, you know full well that we should ignore any radio waves coming from beneath Arctic Ice. Nothing good will come of it.
Despite all our wonderful gadgets and gizmos, we still understand little of our own planet, and almost nothing about what lies beyond. Even what resides beneath the Arctic ice is still a mystery, on the whole.
However, the arctic, due to its desolate nature, is a fantastic place for scientists to get the kind of silence they need to detect things like neutrino particles. The equipment they use to detect them works best without outside interference. So, they fly them over the barren wastes.
The ANITA experiment floats detection equipment over the Arctic to pick up radio signals caused by neutrinos bouncing off the ice. This allows the scientists to study one of the universe’s most elusive, smallest, and most interesting particles.
However, the scientists at the Arctic have been shocked to find radio waves that simply shouldn’t be possible.
Odd Angles, Unexplained Connotations
When neutrinos are detected by the equipment, their angle tells of their origin. They ricochet off the surface of the ice and point to where they came from. However, these new radio waves picked up in the Arctic have no explainable origin.
The neutrinos are travelling at an impossibly steep angle. Furthermore, rather than coming from space, they appear to be originating from below the horizon. With our current understanding of neutrinos, this shouldn’t be possible.
“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. So, right now, it’s one of these long-standing mysteries,” said Dr Stephanie Wissel, who worked on the project.
The radio waves picked up are coming from beneath the Arctic ice. This means they will have had to travel through miles of rock and ice to be picked up. With current understanding, this shouldn’t be possible, and yet here we are.