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Subglacial lakes that will never see the light of day are among the least accessible frontiers of science, brimming with more untold stories than even the planets of our solar system. One thing seems certain: where there's water, there's life—even if said water is at the bottom of a cold lake, in the dark, under more than half a mile of the West Antarctic ice sheet. As he states AGU Advances, scientists analyzed the chemical fingerprints of the ocean and microbes obtained from the sediments and water at the bottom of a subglacial lake called Mercer Lake to describe for the first time where wild microbes acquire carbon, an energy source, and move it through this starkly barren system. They used data from sediment, microbes and the carbon cycle to infer the geologic history of the region, and the results surprised them. While the ice above Mercer Lake was previously thought to have been stable for hundreds of millennia, this new work confirms that the lake was connected to the ocean about 6 years ago and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was smaller than it is today. It was a time when the climate was stable compared to the end of the last ice age and even today's anthropogenic climate change. "This is the first time we have clear geological evidence that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet's grounding line, which is like its coast where the ice meets the ocean, was at least 250 kilometers further inland than it is today—perhaps more," said Ryan Venturelli, lead author of the study and assistant professor at the Colorado School of Mines. Venturelli worked with her former Ph.D. advisor, marine geologist Brad Rosenheim at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science. In other words, just a few thousand years ago, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated about 155 miles — a few tens of miles short of the distance from New York to Boston — before regrowing into its modern configuration.
(according to University of South Florida)
