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American and European climatologists found in southern parts of Greenland, a large subglacial lake with an area of 65 thousand square kilometers that never freezes and throughout visibility is a reservoir where meltwater accumulates, arising on the border between the glacier and the soil, the article says. published in the journal Nature Geoscience. “This discovery has become surprise for us. Our colleagues have already said that flows melt water at the edges of glaciers does not disappear during the winter. We have become the first who managed to find water inside the firn and prove that this water remained liquid throughout the year, “said Richard Forster from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City (USA).
Forster and his colleagues regularly make expeditions to Greenland over the past four years, trying to appreciate the extent to which green ice cover is rapidly decreasing islands. “In April 2011, they drilled several holes in the south. islands and removed ice samples.
To the surprise of scientists, when lifting a drill from a hole with a depth of 10 meters went liquid water, despite the temperature of 15 degrees Celsius below zero. At this time, winter was still going on in Greenland, and before the start of the warming, at least another month remained. Not received desired results, scientists decided to take a sample elsewhere, in a few kilometers from the water “pocket”.
And this time the same thing happened, only when drilling on depth of 25 meters. This fact interested the authors of the article and they decided to define the boundaries of this ice-covered lake with radars. It turned out that this “pond” was incredibly large – its area was 65 thousand square kilometers, and the depth – from 10 to 50 meters.
This ice-covered lake is comparable in size to the largest body of water Africa, Lake Victoria. According to the authors of the article, the existence of this reservoir may explain why climate models are poor explain how melting ice on the “green island” affects growth sea level and Earth’s climate change.
Water Time Greenland Islands
