Impact of human activities on the geomagnetic field of Antarctica: A high resolution aeromagnetic survey over Mario Zucchelli Station

Description

Environmental protection of Antarctica is a fundamental principle of the Antarctic Treaty. Impact assessment and significance evaluation are due for every human activity on the remote continent. While chemical and biological contaminations are widely studied, very little is known about the electromagnetic pollution levels. In this frame, we have evaluated the significance of the impact of Mario Zucchelli Antarctic Station (Northern Victoria Land) on the local geomagnetic field. We have flown a high resolution aeromagnetic survey in drape mode at 320 m over the Station, covering an area of 2 km2. The regional and the local field have been separated by a third order polynomial fitting. After the identification of the anthropic magnetic anomaly due to the Station, we have estimated the magnetic field at the ground level by downward continuation with an original inversion scheme regularized by a minimum gradient support functional to avoid high frequency noise effects. The resulting anthropic static magnetic field at ground extends up to 650 m far from the Station and reaches a maximum peak to peak value of about 2800 nT. This anthropic magnetic anomaly may interact with biological systems, raising the necessity to evaluate the significance of the static magnetic impact of human installations in order to protect the electromagnetic environment and the biota of Antarctica.

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