There May Be A Giant Lake Lurking Beneath The East Antarctic Ice Sheet

There May Be A Giant Lake Lurking Beneath The East Antarctic Ice Sheet

In further proof that our planet still has amazing secrets to give up, scientists are reporting evidence of an enormous, never-before-seen subglacial lake buried beneath the East Antarctic ice sheet. Cthulhu hunters, take note.

The first hints of the lake, presented at the European Geosciences Union Meeting in Vienna this week, include a series of mysterious linear grooves, which appear to cut across more than 1000 kilometres of Princess Elizabeth Land, toward the eastern coast of Antarctica. According to the researchers who spotted the features in satellite imagery, some of them may represent the outflow from a long, ribbon shaped lake that covers nearly 1000 square kilometres.

“We’ve seen these strange, linear channels on the surface, and are inferring these are above massive, 1000-kilometre-long channels, and there’s a relatively large subglacial lake there too,” Martin Siegert of Imperial College London told New Scientist.

If confirmed, the subglacial lake would rank among Antarctica’s largest, second only to Lake Vostok in size. But unlike Lake Vostok, which is buried in the remote heartland of East Antarctica, this lake is close to a coastline and a research station, making it in theory much easier to study.

That’s great news for biologists, who are fascinated by the isolated communities of extreme life forms found kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice. The organisms adapted to live in subglacial lakes may be the closest analogue we’ve got to life on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, or Saturn’s Enceladus.

According to New Scientist, researchers from the US and China recently collected ice-penetrating radar data over Princess Elizabeth Land, which could confirm the presence of a subterranean swimming pool. One way or another, it looks like we’ll soon know whether we’ve found another spot on Earth to study alien life.

[New Scientist]

Top: Vostok station, a Russian Research Station located in Princess Elizabeth Land, East Antarctica. Image: NASA


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.