On June 5, 2019, a massive, ice-covered lake sat atop East Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf. Within six days, all 600 million to 750 million cubic meters of lake water had vanished, leaving a deep sinkhole filled with fractured ice.
“The amount of water that was in the lake was twice that of San Diego Bay. We’re talking about a lot of water,” says Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. Now, using satellite data to reconstruct the event, scientists have solved the mystery of the disappearing lake.
Most likely, the weight of all that water fractured the ice shelf below. Channels in the
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