Antarctic lake suddenly disappeared in 2019, scientists say

A huge ice-covered lake in East Antarctic disappeared in less than a week, potentially due to climate change, a new study reveals.

Researchers used radar images to track the rapid melting event at the Amery Ice Shelf, which occurred in June 2019, during the Antarctic winter.  

Scientists believe the weight of meltwater (water released by the melting of snow or ice) accumulated in the deep lake and cracked open the ice shelf beneath – an event called a ‘hydrofracture’. 

It’s estimated that between 600 million and 750 million cubic meters (21-26 billion cubic feet) of water drained to the ocean below – about twice the volume of San Diego Bay. 

After drainage, in place of the lake, there was a crater-like depression in the ice shelf surface, covering about 4.25 square miles. 

This surface depression, known as an ice ‘doline’, contained the fractured remains of the ice cover.

‘We believe the weight of water accumulated in this deep lake opened a fissure in the ice shelf beneath the lake, a process known as hydrofracture, causing the water to drain away to the ocean below,’ said study author Roland Warner, a glaciologist with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership at the University of Tasmania.

The team can’t say for sure what triggered the rapid draining event.

It is too early to conclude that the drainage of this meltwater lake was related to the warming of the climate around Antarctica, they say. 

But it’s well known that rising air temperatures melts ice shelves, increasing the risk of widespread hydrofracturing. 

Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities cause a rise in global temperatures, which in turn melt ice and snow and result in a rise in sea levels. 

These human activities include burning fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas and oil, which release carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas, as well as deforestation. 

Scientists have previously predicted that sea levels will rise to such an extent within this century that entire cities will be submerged due to greenhouse gas emissions, forcing millions of people to evacuate their homes. 

‘Surface melting over Antarctica’s floating ice shelves is predicted to increase significantly during coming decades, but the implications for their stability are unknown,’ the team say in their paper.   

For their study, researchers used images from Landsat 8, a radar satellite that can ‘see’ during the polar night to pin the event’s timing down to a week or less in June.

The event was also captured by a green-light laser instrument on NASA’s ICESat-2, which transmits pulses of photons and accurately locates the reflection point of each photon it receives back from Earth.

Repeat orbits of ICESat-2 on the exact ground tracks before and after the lake drainage revealed the vertical scale of the disruption.  

‘It is exciting to see ICESat-2 show us details of processes that are occurring on the ice sheet at such fine spatial scale,’ said co-author Helen Amanda Fricker, a glaciologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. 

‘Since surface meltwater on ice shelves can cause their collapse which ultimately leads to sea-level rise when grounded ice is no longer held back, it’s important to understand the processes that weaken ice shelves.’     

The future of the newly formed ‘doline’ is uncertain, the scientists say, although it may accumulate meltwater again or drain to the ocean more frequently.   

The hydrofracture process has been implicated in the collapse of smaller ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula, where meltwater forms on the surface of ice shelves during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer.

But it is not often seen driving through ice as thick as the 1,400 meters (4,590 feet), as observed at this location on Amery Ice Shelf. 

The study has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.