Antarctica produces far more glacial earthquakes than catalogues record, according to a study by Thanh-Son Pham, a geophysicist at the Australian National University, published in Geophysical Research Letters. Writing in The Conversation on Dec. 11, 2025, Pham says he used seismic stations in Antarctica itself, rather than the worldwide network, and found more than 360 glacier seismic events between 2010 and 2023, most of them not yet in any earthquake catalogue.
Glacial earthquakes happen when tall, thin icebergs break off a glacier, capsize and clash with it, sending out seismic waves without the high-frequency signals that usually help detection, Pham explains. About two-thirds of the events he found, 245 of 362, sit near the marine end of Thwaites Glacier, the so-called Doomsday Glacier, which he says would raise global sea levels by 3 meters if it collapsed completely. Most of those, he writes, likely came from capsizing icebergs.
The Thwaites events do not follow the seasonal pattern of Greenland’s glacial earthquakes, Pham writes. Instead, the busiest period, 2018 to 2020, coincides with a satellite-confirmed speed-up of the glacier’s ice tongue, which ocean conditions may have driven. A second cluster near Pine Island Glacier lies 60 to 80 kilometers inland of the waterfront, so capsizing icebergs seem an unlikely cause there, and those events still need follow-up research, he says.
Dating note: this page first ran on July 27, 2026, describing early-July coverage. On review, this desk found the author’s account from December 2025 and no newer findings, and now reports the study on that basis.