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The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission captured this image of Harder Glacier in northern Greenland, where a highly effective subglacial flood surged with such force it fractured the ice sheet and meltwater burst through to the surface.
(Image credit ranking: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2024), processed by ESA)
A hidden lake beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet all of a sudden drained extra than a decade ago, fracturing the ice surface and forming a large crater — an event wonderful lately uncovered by Earth-observing satellites.
The massive ice sheet, located in a faraway station of northern Greenland, harbors a subglacial lake that appears to have flooded in 2014, releasing 23.8 billion gallons (90 million cubic meters) of meltwater over the path of 10 days — roughly equivalent to nine hours of peak race with the circulate over Niagara Falls.
The meltwater from the subglacial lake surged upwards, the satellites showed, bursting through the ice surface. The rapid flooding that followed carved a crater 279 feet (85 meters) deep and 0.77 square miles (2 square kilometers) vast into the surface of the ice sheet. The flood’s upward force also lifted blocks of ice 82 feet (25 meters) above the surface and left behind deep fractures and scoured markings, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA).
“The existence of subglacial lakes beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet is still a relatively recent discovery, and — as our study shows — there is still much we don’t know about how they evolve and how they can impact on the ice sheet system,” Jade Bowling, lead author of the gape from Lancaster College, said in the statement. “Importantly, our work demonstrates the need to better understand how often they drain, and, critically, what the consequences are for the surrounding ice sheet.”
This startling event was came upon using data from a number of Earth-observing satellites, including ESA’s CryoSat, the Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 missions, and NASA’s ICESat-2, as properly as 3D gadgets of the ice sheet surface from the ArcticDEM mission. The amount of meltwater released from underneath the ice in 2014 is regarded as one in every of the largest recorded subglacial floods in Greenland, according to the statement.
Beyond revealing the dramatic surface changes, the satellite data has reshaped scientists’ understanding of how water behaves beneath ice. Previously, scientists believed meltwater generally flowed down from the surface to the ice base, eventually draining into the ocean. This gape reveals that water can also race with the circulate upward, forced through the ice by intense stress, even in areas beforehand view to have frozen beds.
This upward surge of water fractured the overlying ice sheet, creating original channels for the water to escape. This kind of upward water race with the circulate may affect how ice sheets retort to a warming world, which has no longer but been accounted for in latest climate gadgets. Understanding these processes is key to improving predictions of Greenland’s contribution to future sea-stage upward thrust, the researchers said.
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Their findings have been printed on Wednesday (July 30) in the journal Nature Geoscience.
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Samantha Mathewson joined Space.com as an intern in the summer of 2016. She acquired a B.A. in Journalism and Environmental Science at the College of Fresh Haven, in Connecticut. Previously, her work has been printed in Nature World Information. When no longer writing or reading about science, Samantha enjoys traveling to original places and taking images! You can practice her on Twitter @Sam_Ashley13.
