Pink Boulders Reveal a Hidden Antarctic Large

Unlikely pink granite boulders perched excessive atop looming volcanic mountains in West Antarctica have yielded their secrets and techniques after many years of baffling scientists. By taking exact gravity measurements utilizing airplane-mounted devices, a staff led by researchers with the British Antarctic Survey have urged that the boulders are mere crumbs of an enormous slab of granite buried beneath the large Pine Island Glacier.

The slowly flowing glacier, the scientists posit, has been grinding throughout a deep mattress of granite, which is greater than 60 miles vast and practically 4.5 miles thick, for millenia. During this journey, the glacier has been scratching up boulders and depositing them excessive within the Hudson Mountains, most certainly again when the ice sheet was a lot thicker than it’s presently. The researchers dated the boulders by measuring the radioactive decay of parts locked inside and located that the rocks fashioned about 175 million years in the past, 75 million years sooner than many of the surrounding rock. The researchers printed their findings in Communications Earth & Environment this week.

“It’s remarkable that pink granite boulders spotted on the surface have led us to a hidden giant beneath the ice,” Tom Jordan, a BAS geophysicist and lead creator of the paper, stated in a statement. “By combining geological dating with gravity surveys, we’ve not only solved a mystery about where these rocks came from, but also uncovered new information about how the ice sheet flowed in the past and how it might change in the future.”

That future bit is necessary. The area of West Antarctica the place Pine Island Glacier website has skilled a number of the quickest ice loss within the frozen continent over the previous few many years, as local weather change has accelerated. And realizing what lies beneath such dynamic ice fields might help predict the destiny of such options and the way their demise would possibly set off environmental change throughout the globe.

“We have been able to piece together how [the pink boulders] got to where they are today, giving us clues about how the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may change in future,” Joanne Johnson, a BAS geologist and coauthor of the paper stated. “[This is] information that is vital for determining the impact of sea level rise on coastal populations around the world.” 

Who’d have thought that unusual pink boulders in an unlikely place held such large secrets and techniques?

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Lead picture: Jo Johnson, BAS

• Bob Grant

  Posted on October 24, 2025

  Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.