Newly Discovered City-Sized Lake Could Unlock Mystery Behind the 34-Million-Year-Old Antarctic Ice Sheet

Scientists recently discovered a city-size lake hiding deep beneath the largest ice sheet in the world, and it could reveal the secret to the 34-million-year-old history of the sheet.

A Live Science report said that the hidden lake called Lake Snow Eagle, "named after one of the Chinese aircraft that discovered it" lies in a mile-deep canyon beneath 3.2 kilometers of ice in the highlands of the Princess Elizabeth Land on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Essentially, the lake has a 370-square-kilometer surface area, making it one of the hugest sub glacial lakes underneath the plentiful ice of Antarctica.

Polar experts found the lake after three years of exhaustive aerial surveys over the sheet, which they had peered through with the use of radar and special sensors designed to gauge minuscule changes in the gravity of Earth, as well as its magnetic field.

34-Million-Year-Old River Sediments

As the buried lake is situated just a few hundred miles from the ice sheet's edge, science experts believe it could have 34-million-year-old river sediments older than the ice sheet itself.

If the scientists are right about the ancient deposits and are able to find them, they could discover a treasure trove of information about the prior appearance of Antarctica before it froze; how climate change has altered it; and what an increasingly warming world would mean for its future.

The researchers' findings were published in the Geology journal. In this study, Don Blankenship, the co-author and a senior research scientist at The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics said, "this like is likely to have a record of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet's entire history, its initiation over millions of years ago, and its growth and evolution throughout glacial cycles since then.

Blankenship also said that their observations suggest too, that the ice sheet changed substantially about 10,000 years ago, although they have no idea in terms of reasons, a related report from The Sun specified.

Existence of the Lake Confirmed

Scientists obtained their initial hint to the existence of the lake after they spotted a smooth depression in satellite images of the ice sheet taken.

Suspecting that something might be hidden beneath, the scientists mounted airplanes with ice-penetrating radar equipment and flew them over the sheet, having them scanned as they went.

Since water, different from ice, reflects radio waves similar to a mirror, the signal of the radar bounced back, confirming the existence of the lake.

According to Shuai Yan, lead author of the study and a graduate student at UT Austin's Institute for Geophysics, and a flight planner for the lake investigation, he literally jumped when he first saw that bright radar reflection.

Revealing the Geometry of the Ice Sheet

Following the exciting discovery of the underwater lake, flybys in aircraft equipped with gravimeters, and magnetometers gauged the subtle changes to the gravitational and magnetic tugs given by these planes above, as they flew over the sheet's different parts.

This allowed the experts to painstakingly describe the underlying geometry of the ice sheet, revealing a deeply-buried lake that was 48 kilometers in length, 14.5 kilometers in width, and 650 feet in depth.

The next step the researchers are taking is, they are getting to the sediment, although since it is sealed inside many miles of ice in the Earth's coldest region, getting there will be deceptive, a related Science Alert report specified.

Report bout the recent discovery is shown on KXAN's YouTube video below:

Check out more news and information on Antarctica in Science Times.