Sentences with phrase «gamburtsev subglacial»
Mud and sediment from Subglacial Lake Whillans makes its first supraglacial appearance in January 2013.
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It also overlays a network of subglacial lakes.
Scherer (center) collects mud from the bottom of the subglacial lake for analysis.
Their analysis, recently published in Geology, reveals a subglacial lake covering as much as 1,250 square kilometers (making it the second - largest subglacial lake in Antarctica by length after Lake Vostok) and a series of canyons that extend a kilometer deep and 1,100 kilometers across.
Although the subglacial topography is vastly important, «it's unlikely we're ever going to [map] the whole of Antarctica in great detail using radar echo sounding — it's just too costly,» Fretwell says.
The results, and other subglacial analyses, will better equip geologists in understanding how the ice sheet responds to climatic changes.
Now a team of geologists has scoured that area to reveal a massive subglacial lake and a series of canyons, one of which — more than twice as long as the Grand Canyon — could rank as Earth's largest.
Tucked beneath East Antarctica's vast ice sheet is a frozen world, complete with subglacial lakes, rivers, basins, volcanoes and mountains.
Last month, a U.S. team successfully used a hot - water drill — a technology designed to prevent contamination — to reach subglacial Lake Whillans.
The US$ 20 - million Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) project, which Powell oversees, plans to drill into the lake during the 2012 - 13 field season.
At a meeting last week, scientists from Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States described their plans to explore the planet's last uncharted ecosystems by drilling into three very different examples of these subglacial lakes.
Lake Vostok is the best known and largest of the subglacial lakes, measuring roughly the size of Lake Ontario.
When researcher Alberto Behar from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., joined an international Antarctic expedition last month on a trek to investigate Subglacial Lake Whillans, he brought with him a unique instrument designed and funded by NASA to help the researchers study one of the last unexplored aquatic environments on Earth.
Ice deformation data from NASA's ICEsat, which indicates subglacial water movement, suggest that the lake has completely filled and drained twice since data - taking began in 2003.
The U.S. team is one of three international groups that sought to penetrate Antarctica's subglacial waters in the past month, seeking clues not only to glacial microbiology but also to ice sheet dynamics and the impact of climate change on the continent.
She studies the mechanisms of ice sheet collapse, the origins of subglacial lakes, and their hidden ecosystems.
Subglacial ecosystems on the frozen continent clue us in to what life may be like in the outer solar system.
At the meeting, U.S. and British researchers described their longer - term plans for exploring subglacial lakes on the opposite side of the pole.
Today, the team announced that they have the first evidence of microbial life in subglacial Antarctic waters, shown here just as the team's underwater camera reached the bottom of the lake.
In its wake, the subglacial flash flood left a spectacular maze of channels, some hundreds of meters deep, incised into the stone, an intricate complex of meandering pathways called the Labyrinth.
Scientists used the data to explore Antarctic ice thickness and the distribution of subglacial lakes.
The subglacial megaflood, Marchant believes, occurred during the middle Miocene, a period 12 million to 16 million years ago.
Finally, she opens a door on the side of a rocky outcrop and enters the Svartisen Subglacial Laboratory, a research center buried under 650 feet of ice.
The British are positioned to start drilling at Antarctica's Lake Ellsworth in autumn 2012, and an American team hopes to begin drilling to the Whillans Ice Stream, a network of subglacial waterways, in January 2013.
But, as the thickness of the ice over the volcano (between 100 and 400 meters) and the volume of lava are both unknown, it's also unclear whether an eruption will break through the ice, or whether it will remain subglacial.
In 2012, the Russian Antarctic Expedition completed drilling through nearly 4 kilometers of ice to reach the surface of subglacial Lake Vostok.
«We weren't looking for subglacial lakes.
«Scientists discover first super salty subglacial lakes in Canadian Arctic: Super salty water beneath ice could serve as a terrestrial analogue for a habitat for life on other planets.»
On the heels of a Russian drilling effort that reached Lake Vostok, British and American teams also aim to penetrate ancient subglacial lakes
Though all subglacial lakes are good analogues for life beyond Earth, the hypersaline nature of the Devon lakes makes them particularly tantalizing analogues for ice - covered moons in our solar system.
The Labyrinth: One of the most spectacular scenes in Antarctica, the Labyrinth was formed by a subglacial flood some 12 million years ago.
«Although the Devon hypersaline subglacial lakes are very unique discoveries, we may find networks of brine - rich subglacial water systems elsewhere in the Canadian Arctic.»
Subglacial lakes provide earthly analogs of ice - covered oceans deep beneath the surface of moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn.
Untersee is a good model for Mars, he says, because it is supplied by subglacial melt — water that accumulates at the bottom of an ice pile — rather than from surface melting, which does not occur on Mars.
As many surface melt - water lakes form each summer around the Greenland ice sheet, the possibility exists that similar subglacial lakes may be found elsewhere in Greenland.
«Ecosystem» because, just in the last week, the first ever instance of life in a subglacial lake has been spotted.
A surface lake situated nearby may also replenish the subglacial lakes during warm summers.
The discovery builds on research done by Russian researchers at Lake Vostok, another Antarctic subglacial lake.
Subglacial lakes are likely to influence the flow of the ice sheet, impacting global sea level change.
According to a recent National Research Council report, the discovery of subglacial lakes «opened an entirely new area of science in a short period of time.»
When Duncan J. Wingham and his colleagues from University College London reviewed archived satellite records, they noticed that over a period of 16 months, the surface above an unnamed subglacial lake in the center of the East Antarctic ice sheet was sinking.
John Priscu, a microbiologist at Montana State University, Bozeman, is leading an equipment - intense effort to drill into the subglacial Whillans Ice Stream this Antarctic summer.
As yet, no one has touched the waters of a subglacial lake with so much as a drill bit, but a Russian group that has been coring ice over Lake Vostok to get ancient climate records is coming close.
«The location of the melting strengthens the idea that freshwater from the local subglacial drainage system is responsible for the evolving ice shelf features.»
«It takes ages to get programs together,» says Mahlon Kennicutt II, an oceanographer at Texas A&M University and secretary of the Subglacial Antarctic Lake Environments group (SALE).
The study, part of the National Science Foundation - funded Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling project (WISSARD), was supported by UC San Diego's John Dove Isaacs Chair in Natural Philosophy awarded to Fricker.
Subglacial lakes are affecting ice sheets, it seems, not just the other way around.
More surprisingly, they reveal hot rock beneath the Bentley Subglacial Trench, a deep basin at the other end of the transect.
One thing that is known for sure about Antarctica's network of subglacial waterways is that they are not some insignificant sideshow to the grand drama of the continent's ice sheets.
The first person to report evidence of a subglacial lake didn't recognize what he was seeing.