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

Re:Technolog

[Trepidity]

We're not very good at looking through solid substances yet. Not only don't we know what's under the Greenland ice, we don't even know what's under many of our cities. For example, construction of the Thessaloniki metro recently discovered an entire Roman city center buried beneath the modern-day city center. In limited cases you can find some of this kind of stuff with ground-penetrating radar, but in general mapping out stuff that's covered by solid dirt/ice/etc. is not easy, even in the 21st century.