Image courtesy of Ray Swi-hymn CC
BY-SA 2.0.
Joel Kontinen
Scientists have discovered an ancient lakebed buried under more than 1,5 kilometres or a mile of ice that may hold secrets to Greenland's past climate or its ice-free past – that is, the global flood of Noah's flood or 4 500 years ago.
The lake formed when northwest Greenland was ice-free, sometime between hundreds of thousands or
even millions of years ago. Given Greenland's rapid melt today, the lake could reveal something about the Arctic's future as the ice caps shrink.
Paxman and his colleagues
discovered the lake using data from instruments that use radar to penetrate
beneath the ice surface to measure topography; much of the data came from NASA's Operation
IceBridge.
The lake basin
sits 1.1 miles (1.8 kilometers) below the surface of the ice and stretches over
2,700 square miles (7,100 square km), the size of Rhode Island and Delaware
combined. At its deepest point, the lake would have extended about 800 feet
(250 meters) down.
Paxman
and his colleagues reported their findings online Oct. 28 online in the
journal Earth
and Planetary Science Letters
Source:
Pappas, Stephanie. 2020. Primeval Greenland lake found buried beneath a
mile-thick slab of ice, Live Science 11 November.
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