PROHABA.CO – Scientists managed to find a vast aquifer filled with seawater.
This seawater fossil or ‘seawater’ may have been locked up for thousands of years under the fast-flowing ice in West Antarctica.
This is the first time scientists have detected groundwater under ice flows in Antarctica.
The aquifer lies under the same ice flow as a subglacial lake called Lake Whillans, at a shallower depth of about 2,625 feet (800 meters) below the ice.
The discovery could reshape the understanding of cold continents reacting to climate change and the mysterious types of organisms lurking beneath layers of ice.
Lead author of a new study on buried aquifers, former geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Chloe D.
Gustafson explains, the newly discovered groundwater system can be thought of as a giant sponge, composed of porous sediments saturated with water.
“The sponges that we observe have thicknesses ranging from half a kilometer to about two kilometers, so it’s quite deep,” said Gustafon as quoted from Live Science, Saturday (7/5/2022).
Read also: Ningen, Antarctica Mystery Creatures 30 Meters Tall Like Humans
The team describes the sizeable aquifer in a report published May 5, 2022 in the journal Science.
“To me, the most surprising result was the volume of water held in the aquifer,” said Winnie Chu, a glacier geophysicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, who was not involved in the study.
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