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Glaciology

Lubricating lakes

Nature volume 445, pages 830–831 (2007)Cite this article

More than 150 subglacial lakes have been discovered beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. The four most recent additions, found right at the start of fast flow in a large ice stream, suggest that the lakes influence ice dynamics.

Antarctica is well known as the coldest place on Earth, but it is also surprisingly wet. Whereas the upper part of the ice is cold, geothermal heat and the insulating effect of the overlying ice combine towards its base to bring extensive areas of ice at the bed to its melting point. In the most extreme cases, lakes form beneath the ice sheet. In the past 20 years more than 150 such subglacial lakes have been discovered; Lake Vostok, at 15,690 km2 about three-quarters the size of Wales, is the largest and best known1. As satellites provide better coverage and higher-resolution imagery of the Antarctic ice sheet, more and more such lakes are being found. On page 904 of this issue, Bell et al.2 present satellite and ground data that reveal four additional lakes in Dronning Maud Land (sometimes referred to in English as Queen Maud Land), East Antarctica. These lakes are remarkable not only for their size, but also for their location, which is just where the flow of the ice sheet begins to accelerate.

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Figure 1: Slippery slope.
Figure 2: Scenes from above the shores of the Recovery lakes.

W. ISHERWOOD

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jack Kohler is at the Norwegian Polar Institute, Polar Environmental Centre, N-9296 Tromsø, Norway. jack.kohler@npolar.no,

    Jack Kohler

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  1. Jack Kohler
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Kohler, J. Lubricating lakes. Nature 445, 830–831 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/445830a

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