Discovered a big bag of liquid water in the ice ... - The País.com (Spain)

Under the permafrost in southwestern Greenland, there is a giant bag of over 140,000 gigatons of fresh water remains liquid, about zero degrees when the weather thermometers have fallen to 20 under zero. It has an area of ??about 70,000 square kilometers (about the size of Castilla-La Mancha) and the scientists who have discovered explained that feeds water from melting snow that seeps through the ice during the summer.

“Instead of water accumulate in the space between rock particles subsoil and groundwater aquifers in this case is accumulated between ice particles as a slush, and the amazing thing is that it never freezes, even during the dark winter in Greenland, because large amounts of snow fall in the area immediately insulate the bag of liquid water below zero temperatures of the air, “says Rick Foster, a scientist at the University of Utah and leader of this research presented in the journal Nature Geoscience .

The first hint of

surprising finding emerged with perforations made in the area: a pair of ice samples taken by the researchers surfaced dripping. It was in 2011, and the team had to interrupt sampling by not having adequate equipment to drill in a medium with liquid water.

Scientists turned on radar data obtained both from the air with Aircraft Operation IceBridge program, NASA, and tracking the same ice surface with snowmobiles. That could narrow the subglacial bag.

returned to the area in the spring of 2013 with suitable drilling equipment and were able to extract ice cores (old compacted snow) temperature sensors and enter through the holes to liquid water, which turned out to be zero. The aquifer is about twelve feet deep from the surface and reaches the 37 meters at the bottom.

140,000 metric gigatons of water suddenly unloaded accumulate in the ocean, this would increase the level of 0.4 mm, said NASA in a statement.

discovery now permits a deeper understanding of the structure and mechanisms of the glaciers of Greenland and improve models projecting its evolution and impact on the ocean. Foster explains that, apparently, the aquifer is not a recent phenomenon, which has been there a long time.