Lakes Found Under Ice of Antarctica

Scientists have detected a network of lakes under the ice and bitter cold of Antarctica. The lakes fill and empty with rapidly flowing water.

Researchers discovered the data from lasers beamed from space.

More than 100 lakes have been found under the Antarctic ice, according to research published Thursday in the online issue of the journal Science.

The finding may improve understanding of the interaction between global warming and the melting of Antarctic ice, which could contribute to a worldwide rise in the ocean level.

The pockets of water under the ice were not created by global warming as they lie beneath 700m of compressed snow and ice. This is too deep to be affected by temperature changes on the surface. But knowing how they behave is important to understanding the impact of climate change on the Antarctic ice sheet, according to Helen Fricker, author of the study.

About 90 percent of the world's fresh water is locked in the ice cap that covers Antarctica and if it all melts, scientists estimate it could cause a seven-meter rise in the world sea levels. Even a one-meter sea level rise could cause havoc in coastal and low-lying areas around the world.

"Because climate is changing, we need to be able to predict what's going to happen to the Antarctic ice sheet," said Fricker, of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the University of California, San Diego.

"We need computer models to be faithful to the processes that are actually going on on the ice sheet," she said. For now, computer models do not show how the sub-glacial water is moving around.

The ice above the lakes is moving as fast as 0.8 meters a day, which is very fast according to Robert Bindschadler of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, one of the study's co-authors.

"It's the fast-moving ice that determines how the ice sheet responds to climate change on a short timescale," he said in a statement.

"We aren't yet able to predict what these ice streams are going to do. We're still learning about the controlling processes. Water is critical, because it's essentially the grease on the wheel. But we don't know the details yet," he said.