Thanks Red Badger.
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Posted on 11/11/2020 8:58:08 AM PST by SunkenCiv
The remains of a giant, ancient lake have been discovered under Greenland, buried deep below the ice sheet in the northwest of the country and estimated to be hundreds of thousands of years old, if not millions, scientists say.
The huge 'fossil lake bed' is a phenomenon the likes of which scientists haven't seen before in this part of the world...
Last year, scientists reported the discovery of over 50 subglacial lakes beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet: bodies of thawed liquid water trapped between bedrock and the ice sheet overhead.
The new find is of a different nature: an ancient lake basin, long dry and now full of eons of sedimentary infill -- loose rock measuring up to 1.2 kilometres (three-quarters of a mile) thick -- and then covered by another 1.8 kilometres of ice.
When the lake formed long ago, however, the region would have been free of ice, researchers say, and the basin would have supported a monumental lake with a sprawling surface area of approximately 7,100 square kilometres (2,741 square miles).
That's about the same size as the combined area of US states Delaware and Rhode Island, and this massive lake would have held around 580 cubic kilometres (139 cubic miles) of water, being fed by a network of at least 18 ancient streams that once existed to the north of the lake bed, flowing into it along a sloping escarpment...
The giant lake bed -- dubbed 'Camp Century Basin', in reference to a nearby historic military research base -- was identified via observations from NASA's Operation IceBridge mission, an airborne survey of the world's polar regions.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencealert.com ...
The climate of that place seems to have changed a few times of the past millions of years. Might be my fault.
Ok millennials a new source of trendy bottled water.....
Don’t drink it!
No one remembers the “ancient water” found in an episode of Northern Exposure?
LOL. I was thinking the same thing.
Are we supposed to be surprised that under it’s glaciers Greenland would look like... the Canadian Arctic (in summer)? I mean, come on, use your frigging brain! What do glaciers do? They carve up ruts in the rock & form potential lakes if/when there’s a thaw. Great Lakes anybody?
A lake? Or lake bed?
I found a bottle of aged scotch.
Well, I found a bottle, anyway.
"Roughly forever" . . . hmmm, that sounds like a truly scientific measurement.
So it is a depression in the ground from all the ice and this is a big deal?
“So it is a depression in the ground from all the ice and this is a big deal?”
Oddly yes from a geologic standpoint but of no importance otherwise. It is simply a geologic curiosity that I find interesting. I myself think it is much like our great lakes that were gouged out by glaciers and now are huge lakes.
If such happened in the past prior to our last ice age it makes perfect sense. Glaciers carved out these lakes in a past ice age and the glaciers melted as always happens. These became great lakes in Greenland. Then the last Ice Age happened (Oddly we are still in an ice age but that is just by definition of geology) and thus those great lakes in Greenland are now buried under a couple of miles of ice.
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