A vast reservoir of ancient water has been found thousands of feet under the ice in western Antarctica, scientists said in a paper published Thursday in the journal Science. Researchers had long suspected but never before established the existence of such hidden pockets of Antarctic groundwater , which they believe act to lessen friction between ice sheets and underlying bedrock to make the ice more prone to slide from the continent’s interior toward the surrounding ocean. The first-of-its-kind discovery—made possible by an electromagnetic field-measuring technique that is rarely used in polar environments—shows that there’s far more water under the Antarctic ice than scientists realized. It also adds […]