Here's some bad news: There are thousands of glittering blue lakes that have hit East Antarctica.
Does that mean a wonderful tourist world? Not, it means that scientists are very worried.
Now for some worse news. The ice in the Arctics is melting rapidly, as is evident. Greenland's ice sheet is melting rapidly. It thinned by 1 trillion tonnes of ice between 2011 and 2014, mainly due to these lakes.
UK researchers examined hundreds of satellite images and meteorological data that were collected from Langhovde Glacier in East Antarctica. They discovered that between 2000 and 2013, there were about 8,000 lakes.
These supraglacial - or meltwater - lakes, seemed to be rapidly losing themselves into the floating ice threatening the ice shelf.
So far, experts have always thought that East Antarctica was safe from rising climate and ocean temperatures. They had always concentrated on probing the Antarctic Peninsula, the northernmost part of Antarctica. It has displayed signs of rapid atmospheric and ocean warming in recent years.
East Antarctic ice sheet has never been a major threat to experts. Researchers seem to be worried that there is not enough understanding of the impact on supraglacial lakes.
"[East Antarctic is] the part of the continent where people have for quite a long time assumed that it's relatively stable," one of the team, glaciologist Stewart Jamieson from Durham University, said to Chris Mooney. "There's not a huge amount of change, it's very, very cold, and so, it's only very recently that the first supraglacial lakes, on top of the ice, were identified."
With rising air temperatures in the summer, the supraglacial lakes are being formed increasingly in this region.
Even though the lakes do not last too long, they weaken the ice sheets and ice shelves in the region.
"Sometimes, researchers have even been able to document fresh water flowing outward directly into the sea from the base of a glacier," Mooney says.
"That injection of cold fresh water into salty water can then create tornado-like underwater flow patterns at the submerged glacier front that cause further ice loss."
It is mainly due to climate change and rising temperatures.
"What we find is that the appearance of these lakes, unsurprisingly, is correlated directly with the air temperature in the region, and so the maximum number of lakes, and the total area of the lakes, as well as the depth of the lakes, all of these things peak when the air temperatures peak," Jamieson said.
"The size of the lakes ... are probably not big enough to do much at present, but if climate warming continues in the future, we can only expect the size and number of these lakes to increase. So that's what we're looking at," he added.
The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters.
