Researchers have found the solution to the mystery of disappearing lakes in Greenland, and they have proffered scientific reasons for the occurrence. They went into deep research when it became obvious that meltwater lakes in Greenland are draining faster than is usual, especially with a sub-glacial lake that contained 6.7 billion gallons of water evaporating within a season, and another lake that emptied itself twice within two years.
Scientists were able to adduce rising temperatures and climatic changes in the region as reasons for the sudden draining of subglacial meltwater in the world’s largest island – lying between the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic.
“The fact that our lake appears to have been stable for at least several decades, and then drained in a matter of weeks – or less – after a few very hot summers, may signal a fundamental change happening in the ice sheet,” said Ian Howat, an associate professor of earth sciences at The Ohio State University.
Rising environmental heat causes melting ice to pool as meltwater under glaciers within the region, and this in turn overruns the areas plumbing system causing the water to seep into nearby seas and oceans. The flowing meltwater carries enough latent heat to melt nearby ice, and this invariably leads to the drainage of water to the oceans.
“If enough water is pouring down into the Greenland Ice Sheet for us to see the same sub-glacial lake empty and re-fill itself over and over, then there must be so much latent heat being released under the ice that we’d have to expect it to change the large-scale behavior of the ice sheet,” co-author Michael Bevis explained.
This is new knowledge to scientists because they were aware that sub-glacial lakes exist, but never knew climatic temperatures cause them to drain out to sea at nearly 57,000 gallons per second, adding to the incidence of rising ocean levels.
“If we can get better estimates, then we can have better projections for the extent and the impact of global warming,” Marco Tedesco, a co-author of that report. “Greenland is really the big player for sea level rise in the future, so improving climate models is extremely crucial.”