© NASA photograph by John Sonntag/Operation IceBridge.
Sonntag snapped this photograph from the window of the P-3 research plane while flying over the eastern Beaufort Sea. At the time, the aircraft's location was 69.71° North and 138.22° West, about 50 miles northwest of Canada's Mackenzie River Delta. "We saw these sorta-circular features only for a few minutes today," Sonntag wrote from the field. "I don't recall seeing this sort of thing elsewhere."
The features are more of a curiosity than anything else. The main purpose of the flight that day was to make observations of sea ice in an area that lacked coverage by the mission prior to 2013. Still, the image sparked a fair amount of intrigue, so we set out to see what we could learn. That's not always easy based on a photograph or satellite image alone, so the following ideas are speculation.
Comment: So, this aerial photography has been going on for 10 years, it's the first time these scientists have seen them, and there are no other examples of holes like this?
Considering the activity going on in the depths of our planet, many signs we're seeing on the surface, though this may turn out to be seals, there are other, more worrying, theories as to what could be causing this, such as heat coming from below: