THE mysterious origin of undersea hills may have been explained. It’s all down to trapped wind.
The low hills under the Arctic Ocean, which can grow up to 40 metres tall and several hundred metres across, have been a puzzle ever since their discovery in the 1940s. To investigate, William Ussler from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California and his colleagues mapped the sea floor of the Beaufort Sea shelf, off the north coast of Canada. They found that methane was being released from the hilltops.
The team believe that when melting ice sheets flooded the shelves at…
