Reported Sciencenews, Tuesday (13/7/2021), the loss of lake water was caught in the Landsat 8 satellite image belonging to the American Earth Observation. In six days, about 750 million cubic meters of lake water disappeared leaving a deep sinkhole filled with ice cracks.
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“The amount of water in the lake is twice that of San Diego Bay. We’re talking about a lot of water,” said Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.
Now, using satellite data to reconstruct the event, scientists have solved the mystery of the lake Antartika that disappeared.
Most likely, the water mass broke the ice sheet below. Channels in the ice then form, and water drains all at once, in streams like Niagara Falls, glaciologists Roland Warner, Fricker and colleagues report June 23 in Geophysical Research Letters.
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Before they knew where the lake had gone, scientists first saw a hole in the bottom of the lake. “That’s a coincidence,” said Fricker Warner, of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia who had been exploring satellite imagery of Antarctica in January 2020.
Warner saw an ice depression, called a doline, stretching 11 square kilometers and a depth of about 80 meters. Fricker, and their colleagues discovered when depression formed.
Older satellite images reveal that a lake has been in place since at least 1973. Using satellite laser altimeter data, the team compiled estimates of changes in surface elevation over time and from estimates of how much water the lake once had.
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It is unclear whether the loss of the lake is linked to climate change. Ice lakes and dolines occur regularly in this ice sheet Antartika , said Fricker. But this is the first time scientists have had evidence to piece together how such an event occurred.
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