Water beneath glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland is flowing into nearby oceans, carrying elements that might affect the way life grows and flourishes, new research has found.
The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that subglacial lakes in Antarctica and streams emerging from under the Greenland Ice Sheet contain trace elements including iron, which has long been considered a necessary nutrient to feed phytoplankton, microscopic marine algae that act as a counterweight to global warming because they pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
“This is probably the first attempt to look at the whole suite of both nutrients and micronutrients in subglacial lakes at the same time,” said Berry Lyons, a co-principal investigator on the study, a professor of earth sciences, a university distinguished scholar at The Ohio State University and Sustainability Institute affiliated faculty.
Scientists have known since about 2007 that there are lakes draining beneath glaciers in Antarctica, and that those lakes are naturally occurring phenomena, not caused by climate change. But this study shows that the water contained in subglacial lakes could affect surrounding oceans, something that had not been previously known.
To understand the contents of the lakes and flowing water that form beneath glaciers, teams drilled into the ice sheet in West Antarctica until they reached the lake below, and sampled meltwater flowing out from under Leverett Glacier in Greenland. The lake they drilled to in Antarctica, Mercer Subglacial Lake, is named for the late John Mercer, a glaciologist at Ohio State and the Ohio State Byrd Polar and Climate Center’s first senior research scientist. The lake is about 500 miles from the South Pole; the glacier above it is a little more than a kilometer thick.
Read more about Lakes below glaciers could enrich oceans near Antarctica and Greenland