Former Sequoia partner Matt Miller has already locked in $355 million for his new VC firm, Evantic, which is also backed by Sequoia, TechCrunch learned.
Last December, Miller announced his departure from Sequoia after twelve years to “start [his] own fund focused on the great founders of Europe.”
Despite the European focus, TechCrunch’s understanding is that Evantic will actually invest on both sides of the Atlantic, with a focus on B2B companies at the Series B and growth stages. However, its activities will be conducted from London, where Miller moved from California in 2021.
Before moving to the U.K., Miller had already spearheaded Sequoia’s expansion into Europe and eventually joined Sequoia’s European office in London, where he worked alongside its first local hire, Luciana Lixandru, who remains there.
Sequoia on Monday declined to comment on Miller or the new fund. TechCrunch has also reached out to Miller directly.
Miller’s fundraising has exceeded expectations. Initial reports indicated that Miller was raising $300 million for this new venture. Sources close to the matter now corroborate the Financial Times’ newer report that the target is $400 million and that Sequoia is participating as a limited partner. TechCrunch has reached out to Sequoia for confirmation.
Specifically, Miller’s new firm has secured $350 million from external sources, per a U.S. regulatory filing; Evantic has also received $5 million in internal commitments and is in the process of closing the remaining $45 million from founders and other members of the startup ecosystem, sources tell TechCrunch.
Miller’s departure appears to stem primarily from a failed power play at portfolio company Klarna. Not long before announcing his exit, Miller had reportedly tried and failed to oust former colleague Michael Moritz from the board of the buy-now-pay-later behemoth. Sequoia soon after apologized for supporting the attempt and gave Miller’s board seat to another partner.
At the same time, broader tensions were surfacing within Sequoia over partner Shaun Maguire, whose views have proven divisive both internally and among portfolio founders. Wunderlist founder Christian Reber, one of the first Sequoia-backed founders in Europe, expressed his disagreement back in January with Maguire over the German far-right party AfD earlier this year. Miller and Lixandru also distanced themselves from the views supported by Maguire, who has since then made more controversial comments.
Despite the Klarna incident, Miller appears to maintain good relations that Sequoia, as evidenced by the firm’s participation as an LP in his new venture. Miller also remains a venture partner at Sequoia and continues to represent the firm on several boards.
During his time at Sequoia, Miller worked closely with companies including Confluent, dbt Labs, Docker, Grafana, Graphcore, Hex, and Tessian. He also overlapped with longtime Sequoia employee Spencer Hemphill, who left before Miller did and is now reportedly Evantic’s CFO.
While technically a U.S. fund, Evantic will now join the ranks of cross-Atlantic venture firms including Index Ventures and Northzone, the latter of which said it was “doubling down on the transatlantic.” It will also be similar in size to the $348 million that the Norrsken Foundation, established by Klarna’s founder, is investing in European startups that use “AI for good.”
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#Sequoia #partner #Matt #Miller #raises #355M #fund #Sequoias #backing #TechCrunch
![xAI fired an engineer who raised alarms about Grok safety, new lawsuit claims | TechCrunch
A former engineer at Elon Musk’s xAI has filed suit against the company and its parent SpaceX claiming he was fired for raising concerns about AI safety.
Devin Kim, who left xAI in September 2025, filed the suit in a California state court on Tuesday. The complaint comes days before SpaceX is set to join the public markets in what’s shaping up to be the largest IPO in history.
According to the lawsuit, which TechCrunch has viewed, Kim became a prominent voice for AI safety while working on Grok, xAI’s AI chatbot. He allegedly complained repeatedly about xAI’s failure to prioritize safety in Grok’s development, a product that has since come under fire for a range of safety and behavioral issues. In particular, Kim was concerned with the possibility that Grok could foment discrimination and help spread information about weapons of mass destruction.
“Grok, of course, proved Mr. Kim right by engaging in spectacular displays of online hatred and vitriol, with the model likening itself to Hitler (‘MechaHitler’),” the lawsuit reads. “Following the Hitler debacle, Mr. Kim worked to re-evaluate Grok’s political bias and discriminatory tendencies.”
September was my last month at xAI! I joined as one of the first members of the post-training team in 2024 and eventually led research tooling, where we built some of the world’s best systems to accelerate Grok’s development.On my first day, I was at the whiteboard with @ibab…— Devin Kim (@devindkim) October 3, 2025
A few months after Kim departed xAI, Grok made headlines again when the chatbot was used to flood X — Musk’s social media platform that also falls under the xAI umbrella — with nonconsensual sexual imagery.
The lawsuit also positions Kim as a whistleblower who was concerned about xAI’s alleged disregard for AI safety as “unlawful” in areas such as internet regulation, consumer protection and unfair business practices, and arms and explosives regulation, among others.
xAI and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Kim’s focus on AI safety predates his time at xAI. While working at Scale AI, Kim worked on early safety AI initiatives, like leading a project that produced training data for AI to train systems to detect harmful content and comply with governance policies. Last week, the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, which focuses on AI risks, named Kim as its president.
Interestingly, the lawsuit doesn’t implicate Musk himself as a reason for a lack of safety. Rather, Kim’s lawyers describe Musk as having directed xAI to follow the law and implement appropriate safety and testing processes. Instead the claim targets Kim’s supervisor, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba — who left the company earlier this year — saying that Ba ignored Musk’s directives and retaliated against Kim for pushing for safeguards, in an effort to “silence his repeated complaints about AI safety and biases.”
The lawsuit portrays Ba as someone who vehemently opposed AI safety measures, allegedly telling Kim at one point “AI will kill us all anyway,” and who was instead driven by a mission to make xAI the first to reach superintelligence.
“In one instance in or around August 2025, Mr. Ba attempted to thwart EU safety regulations during the release of Grok Code 1, misrepresenting aspects of the model in order to avoid legally required testing,” the complaint says. “Mr. Ba indicated that he would rather release an unsafe model than a poor-performing one. Mr. Musk ultimately had to intervene.”
According to the lawsuit, Kim intended to give a presentation of his findings the week of September 15, 2025, but Ba called him into a meeting and told him they should “go [their] separate ways” without providing a satisfactory reason.
TechCrunch has reached out to Ba for comment.
Kim is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, as well as a declaratory judgment that xAI and SpaceX’s conduct was unlawful.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#xAI #fired #engineer #raised #alarms #Grok #safety #lawsuit #claims #TechCrunchai safety,devin kim,Grok,SpaceX,xAI](https://i3.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/grok-getty.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 "xAI fired an engineer who raised alarms about Grok safety, new lawsuit claims | TechCrunch
A former engineer at Elon Musk’s xAI has filed suit against the company and its parent SpaceX claiming he was fired for raising concerns about AI safety.
Devin Kim, who left xAI in September 2025, filed the suit in a California state court on Tuesday. The complaint comes days before SpaceX is set to join the public markets in what’s shaping up to be the largest IPO in history.
According to the lawsuit, which TechCrunch has viewed, Kim became a prominent voice for AI safety while working on Grok, xAI’s AI chatbot. He allegedly complained repeatedly about xAI’s failure to prioritize safety in Grok’s development, a product that has since come under fire for a range of safety and behavioral issues. In particular, Kim was concerned with the possibility that Grok could foment discrimination and help spread information about weapons of mass destruction.
“Grok, of course, proved Mr. Kim right by engaging in spectacular displays of online hatred and vitriol, with the model likening itself to Hitler (‘MechaHitler’),” the lawsuit reads. “Following the Hitler debacle, Mr. Kim worked to re-evaluate Grok’s political bias and discriminatory tendencies.”
September was my last month at xAI! I joined as one of the first members of the post-training team in 2024 and eventually led research tooling, where we built some of the world’s best systems to accelerate Grok’s development.On my first day, I was at the whiteboard with @ibab…— Devin Kim (@devindkim) October 3, 2025
A few months after Kim departed xAI, Grok made headlines again when the chatbot was used to flood X — Musk’s social media platform that also falls under the xAI umbrella — with nonconsensual sexual imagery.
The lawsuit also positions Kim as a whistleblower who was concerned about xAI’s alleged disregard for AI safety as “unlawful” in areas such as internet regulation, consumer protection and unfair business practices, and arms and explosives regulation, among others.
xAI and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Kim’s focus on AI safety predates his time at xAI. While working at Scale AI, Kim worked on early safety AI initiatives, like leading a project that produced training data for AI to train systems to detect harmful content and comply with governance policies. Last week, the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, which focuses on AI risks, named Kim as its president.
Interestingly, the lawsuit doesn’t implicate Musk himself as a reason for a lack of safety. Rather, Kim’s lawyers describe Musk as having directed xAI to follow the law and implement appropriate safety and testing processes. Instead the claim targets Kim’s supervisor, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba — who left the company earlier this year — saying that Ba ignored Musk’s directives and retaliated against Kim for pushing for safeguards, in an effort to “silence his repeated complaints about AI safety and biases.”
The lawsuit portrays Ba as someone who vehemently opposed AI safety measures, allegedly telling Kim at one point “AI will kill us all anyway,” and who was instead driven by a mission to make xAI the first to reach superintelligence.
“In one instance in or around August 2025, Mr. Ba attempted to thwart EU safety regulations during the release of Grok Code 1, misrepresenting aspects of the model in order to avoid legally required testing,” the complaint says. “Mr. Ba indicated that he would rather release an unsafe model than a poor-performing one. Mr. Musk ultimately had to intervene.”
According to the lawsuit, Kim intended to give a presentation of his findings the week of September 15, 2025, but Ba called him into a meeting and told him they should “go [their] separate ways” without providing a satisfactory reason.
TechCrunch has reached out to Ba for comment.
Kim is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, as well as a declaratory judgment that xAI and SpaceX’s conduct was unlawful.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#xAI #fired #engineer #raised #alarms #Grok #safety #lawsuit #claims #TechCrunchai safety,devin kim,Grok,SpaceX,xAI")
![Scientists Found a Continent-Sized Geological Structure Hiding Beneath Antarctica
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost unfathomably huge. Covering about 75% of the entire frigid continent (nearly everything on its side of the Transantarctic Mountains), the sheet covers about 3.9 million square miles (10.2 million square kilometers) and extends down 1.4 miles (2.2 km), on average, before coming into contact with Earth’s surface. At its deepest, the ice plunges down over 3 miles (4.9 km). For decades, scientists assumed that this literally continent-sized block of ice rested on an expansive and stable chunk of Earth’s crust known as a craton. A team of researchers has now complicated that picture—mapping a vast, interconnected geological structure that fans out from a troubling “tectonic deformation.” Beneath this ice sheet, thinner and more geologically recent slices of crusty lithosphere fan out into hidden valleys called “pull-apart basins.” These basins—30 elongated wedge-shaped valleys in total—constitute an entirely new, continental-scale geological region underneath Antarctica, in fact, one which the researchers have named the East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province (EAFBP). But it’s how they likely formed that has now caught researchers’ attention.
To put it bluntly, it turns out that about 90% of the planet’s fresh water ice may not be on solid ground. Geologist John Goodge called the team’s findings “provocative” in an independent commentary on the new study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“East Antarctica is typically considered from seismic tomography and geodetics to be ancient and generally stable,” according to Goodge, who studies continental tectonics with the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute. “[But] something else is going on at depth.” Continental divides Goodge speculates that this seemingly “coherent pull-apart system,” as presented in the new study, might help explain a variety of mysterious heat and water flows beneath this ice sheet’s surface, like that enormous subglacial lake identified in 2016 or some of the hundreds more like it.
The study’s authors, led by geophysicist Egidio Armadillo at the University of Genoa in Italy, agreed: “Because these basins underlie about half of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, they are likely to heavily influence both ice-flow and landscape evolution,” the researchers wrote in their study, also published Thursday in Nature Geoscience. Armadillo’s team, coordinating across Europe and the U.K., developed their new understanding of Antarctica’s hidden bedrock via an exhaustive set of sensory data. Gravitational and magnetic anomalies were mapped via low-altitude airborne surveys. Ground surface features were mapped with seismic tools, using sound waves that vibrate through the ice and ping back information about subglacial landscapes in 3D. The grey, magenta, and cyan lines represent the apparent new fault lines discovered. Credit: Nature Geoscience All of this data—the fruits of “multi-national efforts to image within and below the ice sheet,” as Goodge put it—had already revealed that regions of the continent were “undergoing more rapid movement and ice-mass loss than previously recognized.” Armadillo’s team merely helped to explain why.
The mechanism Armadillo and his colleagues proposed for the formation of these fan-shaped basins is called “distributed rotational extension.” It involves points called Euler poles around which tectonic plates pivot or rotate rather than smash into each other or pull apart. The result is a bit like decks of cards being spread out on a table, thinning out the stack of Earth’s crust as it moves. An icy situation Goodge took pains to spell out the basins’ implications for melting Antarctic ice due to climate change and the risk of rising global sea levels.
The mere existence of these basins, he wrote, “could introduce widespread, systemic instability to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet” via thinner layers of Earth’s crust and more heat flow from below. On top of that, a series of fault-line “troughs” documented between the basins appear “tailor-made to promote outward flow of ice streams from the interior” into the world’s oceans, he said. That said, the team’s findings are unlikely to end this debate. As Goodge noted, Antarctica is “the last continental frontier of scientific exploration.” It’s still a very mysterious place, one that’s challenging to study given its inhospitable temperatures and extreme geography. Its “cryptic subglacial geology” might stay that way for a while. #Scientists #ContinentSized #Geological #Structure #Hiding #Beneath #AntarcticaAntarctica,Geology,mapping,Plate tectonics](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/East-Antarctic-Fan-shaped-Basin-Province.jpeg "Scientists Found a Continent-Sized Geological Structure Hiding Beneath Antarctica
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost unfathomably huge. Covering about 75% of the entire frigid continent (nearly everything on its side of the Transantarctic Mountains), the sheet covers about 3.9 million square miles (10.2 million square kilometers) and extends down 1.4 miles (2.2 km), on average, before coming into contact with Earth’s surface. At its deepest, the ice plunges down over 3 miles (4.9 km). For decades, scientists assumed that this literally continent-sized block of ice rested on an expansive and stable chunk of Earth’s crust known as a craton. A team of researchers has now complicated that picture—mapping a vast, interconnected geological structure that fans out from a troubling “tectonic deformation.” Beneath this ice sheet, thinner and more geologically recent slices of crusty lithosphere fan out into hidden valleys called “pull-apart basins.” These basins—30 elongated wedge-shaped valleys in total—constitute an entirely new, continental-scale geological region underneath Antarctica, in fact, one which the researchers have named the East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province (EAFBP). But it’s how they likely formed that has now caught researchers’ attention.
To put it bluntly, it turns out that about 90% of the planet’s fresh water ice may not be on solid ground. Geologist John Goodge called the team’s findings “provocative” in an independent commentary on the new study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“East Antarctica is typically considered from seismic tomography and geodetics to be ancient and generally stable,” according to Goodge, who studies continental tectonics with the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute. “[But] something else is going on at depth.” Continental divides Goodge speculates that this seemingly “coherent pull-apart system,” as presented in the new study, might help explain a variety of mysterious heat and water flows beneath this ice sheet’s surface, like that enormous subglacial lake identified in 2016 or some of the hundreds more like it.
The study’s authors, led by geophysicist Egidio Armadillo at the University of Genoa in Italy, agreed: “Because these basins underlie about half of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, they are likely to heavily influence both ice-flow and landscape evolution,” the researchers wrote in their study, also published Thursday in Nature Geoscience. Armadillo’s team, coordinating across Europe and the U.K., developed their new understanding of Antarctica’s hidden bedrock via an exhaustive set of sensory data. Gravitational and magnetic anomalies were mapped via low-altitude airborne surveys. Ground surface features were mapped with seismic tools, using sound waves that vibrate through the ice and ping back information about subglacial landscapes in 3D. The grey, magenta, and cyan lines represent the apparent new fault lines discovered. Credit: Nature Geoscience All of this data—the fruits of “multi-national efforts to image within and below the ice sheet,” as Goodge put it—had already revealed that regions of the continent were “undergoing more rapid movement and ice-mass loss than previously recognized.” Armadillo’s team merely helped to explain why.
The mechanism Armadillo and his colleagues proposed for the formation of these fan-shaped basins is called “distributed rotational extension.” It involves points called Euler poles around which tectonic plates pivot or rotate rather than smash into each other or pull apart. The result is a bit like decks of cards being spread out on a table, thinning out the stack of Earth’s crust as it moves. An icy situation Goodge took pains to spell out the basins’ implications for melting Antarctic ice due to climate change and the risk of rising global sea levels.
The mere existence of these basins, he wrote, “could introduce widespread, systemic instability to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet” via thinner layers of Earth’s crust and more heat flow from below. On top of that, a series of fault-line “troughs” documented between the basins appear “tailor-made to promote outward flow of ice streams from the interior” into the world’s oceans, he said. That said, the team’s findings are unlikely to end this debate. As Goodge noted, Antarctica is “the last continental frontier of scientific exploration.” It’s still a very mysterious place, one that’s challenging to study given its inhospitable temperatures and extreme geography. Its “cryptic subglacial geology” might stay that way for a while. #Scientists #ContinentSized #Geological #Structure #Hiding #Beneath #AntarcticaAntarctica,Geology,mapping,Plate tectonics")
![Scientists Found a Continent-Sized Geological Structure Hiding Beneath Antarctica
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost unfathomably huge. Covering about 75% of the entire frigid continent (nearly everything on its side of the Transantarctic Mountains), the sheet covers about 3.9 million square miles (10.2 million square kilometers) and extends down 1.4 miles (2.2 km), on average, before coming into contact with Earth’s surface. At its deepest, the ice plunges down over 3 miles (4.9 km). For decades, scientists assumed that this literally continent-sized block of ice rested on an expansive and stable chunk of Earth’s crust known as a craton. A team of researchers has now complicated that picture—mapping a vast, interconnected geological structure that fans out from a troubling “tectonic deformation.” Beneath this ice sheet, thinner and more geologically recent slices of crusty lithosphere fan out into hidden valleys called “pull-apart basins.” These basins—30 elongated wedge-shaped valleys in total—constitute an entirely new, continental-scale geological region underneath Antarctica, in fact, one which the researchers have named the East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province (EAFBP). But it’s how they likely formed that has now caught researchers’ attention.
To put it bluntly, it turns out that about 90% of the planet’s fresh water ice may not be on solid ground. Geologist John Goodge called the team’s findings “provocative” in an independent commentary on the new study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“East Antarctica is typically considered from seismic tomography and geodetics to be ancient and generally stable,” according to Goodge, who studies continental tectonics with the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute. “[But] something else is going on at depth.” Continental divides Goodge speculates that this seemingly “coherent pull-apart system,” as presented in the new study, might help explain a variety of mysterious heat and water flows beneath this ice sheet’s surface, like that enormous subglacial lake identified in 2016 or some of the hundreds more like it.
The study’s authors, led by geophysicist Egidio Armadillo at the University of Genoa in Italy, agreed: “Because these basins underlie about half of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, they are likely to heavily influence both ice-flow and landscape evolution,” the researchers wrote in their study, also published Thursday in Nature Geoscience. Armadillo’s team, coordinating across Europe and the U.K., developed their new understanding of Antarctica’s hidden bedrock via an exhaustive set of sensory data. Gravitational and magnetic anomalies were mapped via low-altitude airborne surveys. Ground surface features were mapped with seismic tools, using sound waves that vibrate through the ice and ping back information about subglacial landscapes in 3D. The grey, magenta, and cyan lines represent the apparent new fault lines discovered. Credit: Nature Geoscience All of this data—the fruits of “multi-national efforts to image within and below the ice sheet,” as Goodge put it—had already revealed that regions of the continent were “undergoing more rapid movement and ice-mass loss than previously recognized.” Armadillo’s team merely helped to explain why.
The mechanism Armadillo and his colleagues proposed for the formation of these fan-shaped basins is called “distributed rotational extension.” It involves points called Euler poles around which tectonic plates pivot or rotate rather than smash into each other or pull apart. The result is a bit like decks of cards being spread out on a table, thinning out the stack of Earth’s crust as it moves. An icy situation Goodge took pains to spell out the basins’ implications for melting Antarctic ice due to climate change and the risk of rising global sea levels.
The mere existence of these basins, he wrote, “could introduce widespread, systemic instability to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet” via thinner layers of Earth’s crust and more heat flow from below. On top of that, a series of fault-line “troughs” documented between the basins appear “tailor-made to promote outward flow of ice streams from the interior” into the world’s oceans, he said. That said, the team’s findings are unlikely to end this debate. As Goodge noted, Antarctica is “the last continental frontier of scientific exploration.” It’s still a very mysterious place, one that’s challenging to study given its inhospitable temperatures and extreme geography. Its “cryptic subglacial geology” might stay that way for a while. #Scientists #ContinentSized #Geological #Structure #Hiding #Beneath #AntarcticaAntarctica,Geology,mapping,Plate tectonics](https://i0.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/East-Antarctic-Fan-shaped-Basin-Province.jpeg?ssl=1 "Scientists Found a Continent-Sized Geological Structure Hiding Beneath Antarctica
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost unfathomably huge. Covering about 75% of the entire frigid continent (nearly everything on its side of the Transantarctic Mountains), the sheet covers about 3.9 million square miles (10.2 million square kilometers) and extends down 1.4 miles (2.2 km), on average, before coming into contact with Earth’s surface. At its deepest, the ice plunges down over 3 miles (4.9 km). For decades, scientists assumed that this literally continent-sized block of ice rested on an expansive and stable chunk of Earth’s crust known as a craton. A team of researchers has now complicated that picture—mapping a vast, interconnected geological structure that fans out from a troubling “tectonic deformation.” Beneath this ice sheet, thinner and more geologically recent slices of crusty lithosphere fan out into hidden valleys called “pull-apart basins.” These basins—30 elongated wedge-shaped valleys in total—constitute an entirely new, continental-scale geological region underneath Antarctica, in fact, one which the researchers have named the East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province (EAFBP). But it’s how they likely formed that has now caught researchers’ attention.
To put it bluntly, it turns out that about 90% of the planet’s fresh water ice may not be on solid ground. Geologist John Goodge called the team’s findings “provocative” in an independent commentary on the new study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“East Antarctica is typically considered from seismic tomography and geodetics to be ancient and generally stable,” according to Goodge, who studies continental tectonics with the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute. “[But] something else is going on at depth.” Continental divides Goodge speculates that this seemingly “coherent pull-apart system,” as presented in the new study, might help explain a variety of mysterious heat and water flows beneath this ice sheet’s surface, like that enormous subglacial lake identified in 2016 or some of the hundreds more like it.
The study’s authors, led by geophysicist Egidio Armadillo at the University of Genoa in Italy, agreed: “Because these basins underlie about half of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, they are likely to heavily influence both ice-flow and landscape evolution,” the researchers wrote in their study, also published Thursday in Nature Geoscience. Armadillo’s team, coordinating across Europe and the U.K., developed their new understanding of Antarctica’s hidden bedrock via an exhaustive set of sensory data. Gravitational and magnetic anomalies were mapped via low-altitude airborne surveys. Ground surface features were mapped with seismic tools, using sound waves that vibrate through the ice and ping back information about subglacial landscapes in 3D. The grey, magenta, and cyan lines represent the apparent new fault lines discovered. Credit: Nature Geoscience All of this data—the fruits of “multi-national efforts to image within and below the ice sheet,” as Goodge put it—had already revealed that regions of the continent were “undergoing more rapid movement and ice-mass loss than previously recognized.” Armadillo’s team merely helped to explain why.
The mechanism Armadillo and his colleagues proposed for the formation of these fan-shaped basins is called “distributed rotational extension.” It involves points called Euler poles around which tectonic plates pivot or rotate rather than smash into each other or pull apart. The result is a bit like decks of cards being spread out on a table, thinning out the stack of Earth’s crust as it moves. An icy situation Goodge took pains to spell out the basins’ implications for melting Antarctic ice due to climate change and the risk of rising global sea levels.
The mere existence of these basins, he wrote, “could introduce widespread, systemic instability to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet” via thinner layers of Earth’s crust and more heat flow from below. On top of that, a series of fault-line “troughs” documented between the basins appear “tailor-made to promote outward flow of ice streams from the interior” into the world’s oceans, he said. That said, the team’s findings are unlikely to end this debate. As Goodge noted, Antarctica is “the last continental frontier of scientific exploration.” It’s still a very mysterious place, one that’s challenging to study given its inhospitable temperatures and extreme geography. Its “cryptic subglacial geology” might stay that way for a while. #Scientists #ContinentSized #Geological #Structure #Hiding #Beneath #AntarcticaAntarctica,Geology,mapping,Plate tectonics")
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