Huge Pool of Ice-Free Water Discovered Under Greenland Ice

The BBC reports that researchers have discovered a huge pool of meltwater beneath Greenland's ice sheet, trapped "in the air space between particles of ice, similar to the way that fruit juice stays liquid in a slush drink." From the article, based on research published in Nature Geoscience (abstract): "The scientists say the water is prevented from freezing by the large amounts of snow that fall on the surface of the ice sheet late in the summer. This insulates the water from the air temperatures which are below freezing, allowing the water to persist as liquid all year long. Other researchers believe this discovery may help explain disparities between projections of mass loss by climate models and observations from satellites."

Comments

Technolog

[Nerdfest]

Given our current level of technology, I'm always amazed when we discover large scale things like this. We have out cities mapped and photographed down to the meter, but we keep finding things like this.

Re:Technolog

[sycodon]

Just another example of Man thinking he has everything figured out only to be made a fool of by nature.

Re:Technolog

[bledri]

Just another example of Man thinking he has everything figured out only to be made a fool of by nature.

Who claims to know everything? Certainly no scientist does. If they knew everything they wouldn't have anything to figure out and figuring out "how life, the universe and everything" work is the what science is about.

Re:Technolog

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah...Good thing they weren't using them to publish information that's at the core of some public policy or something.

Re:Technolog

[quenda]

Who claims to know everything? Certainly no scientist does.

Don't worry. Just another example of One Man making a sweeping claim, only to be made a fool of by the Wisdom of Slashdot.

Re:Technolog

[Immerman]

No, they believe they know *something*: That the planet *is* warming at an alarming rate, and that human produced CO2 is the forcing factor. Basically all the data collected to date corroborates this, and so that much is considered settled. The exact *implications* of those facts is still very much up in the air. We know the ice caps will melt, that's firmly within the error bars on the model. The exact speed at which it happens, the implications thereof, and the various confounding factors that may arise along the way, *that* is all still very much under examination.

Consider an example - we have a pretty good model of gravity - so if I throw a baseball with a given speed and direction we can model the exact parabolic path it would follow in a vacuum, and that will give us a pretty good idea of where it will land. For a better model we'll have to factor in air resistance and wind velocity, which will give us a much more accurate guess, but still not be perfectly accurate. Then we'd need to factor in any spin on the ball. We could find the exact local gravity (which fluctuates by almost 1% over the Earth's surface) and get even more accurate. If we had a sufficiently detailed weather model (or a large sealed room) we could factor in the fluctuations in air velocity over the course of the balls path. We could even model the exact surface features of the ball and how they influence it's movement as the air drags across it. It *still* wouldn't be completely accurate, but would probably be accurate to within some fraction of an inch. Provided I don't hit a passing bird and totally disrupt the prediction (a totally unexpected major confounding factor) For most purposes though that initial "ball in a vacuum" estimate, with sufficient error bars, is perfectly servicable.

With climate science we're still kind at the level of trying to take the ball's spin into account. There are lots of variables still not understood, and there may even be some giant major confounding factors that end up giving us a "get out of jail free" card. (Aliens swoop in to save us? Rush Limbaugh's head implodes and sucks all the excess hot air out of the world?) The core of the matter though is that, to the limits of our current understanding we are actively creating a situation that is going to have a really drastic impact on our planet's ability to continue supporting us, and the sooner we start facing the problem the cheaper and less severe it will be to make sure we can still support at least a couple billion people by the end of the century. We could have started changing our behaviors 50 years ago to almost completely avoid it, but back then all we had was a crude theory easily dismissed by vested interests. Now we're starting to see the first obvious (to the layman) undeniable signs that the theory was correct, and have fleshed it out to be ever more accurate. Yet people still want to deny that our actions are causing a problem.

Look at it this way - if I were to propose that we restructure our society because in the next fifty years some major confounding factor will be discovered in our theory of gravity that will allow for cheap and simple levitation, you would think I was nuts. Yet when people say we should continue on with business as usual because surely some unexpected confounding factor in climate science will make everything okay, somehow that's okay?

Re:Right

[sumdumass]

Isn't that a result of the salinity keeping it from freezing?

Anyways, we have seen supercooling effects like this in the past where the pressure involved allows water to remain below it's freezing point. It's the theory behind an ice dam in the Midwest US that caused a lot of the geographical markings when it burst. I don't really see anything extraordinary here as apposed to theories in history. It's just that is is happening right now in front of us. Water does have that quality, under pressure, it raises the boiling point and can lower the point which it will actually freeze.