You’ll never guess what lies beneath the Greenland ice cap – BGR

• Scientists have discovered a huge lake bed hiding deep beneath Greenland’s thick ice sheet.
• The lake is said to have covered 2,700 square miles, although it’s hard to say how old the lake really is.
• Sediment analysis would reveal the age of the lake, but it would take a lot of work to get there.

Greenland, despite its name, is not entirely green. It’s actually covered in ice – that was always the mind-boggling thing teachers loved to reveal when they told us Greenland and Iceland are basically the opposite of what their names suggest – and some of that ice is incredibly thick. Understanding what might be hidden under this ice has been a challenge for scientists, but new research suggests Greenland is hiding something big.

Using data from NASA’s Operation IceBridge, researchers were able to determine that there was a colossal lake bed sitting far below Greenland’s thick ice sheet. The research was published in the journal Letters from Earth and Planetary Science.

Multiple data sources were used to make the discovery, with NASA’s Operation IceBridge – which provides a three-dimensional representation of arctic ice – helping to reveal the huge basin under the ice that was probably once a lake covering an area of about 2,700 square miles. Needless to say, this is an absolutely huge area, and a lake this size would have dominated the landscape before it became covered in thick ice.

“This could be an important repository of information, in a landscape that is currently completely hidden and inaccessible,” Guy Paxman, lead author of the book, said in a statement. “We are trying to understand how the Greenland ice sheet has behaved in the past. This is important if we are to understand how it will behave in the decades to come.

The find is great, but one very important thing is missing, and that is an estimate of the actual age of the lake bed. This is particularly difficult because the Greenland ice does not arrive a day and never moves. The ice cap gradually invaded the land, advancing to new areas, sometimes retreating, then moving back. This happens over tens of millions of years, so it’s hard to guess when the lake was present.

Determining exactly when the lake was “alive”, so to speak, is actually possible, but it will take a lot of work. According to the researchers, sediment in the lake bed would help reveal its age and also offer clues as to when ice was present in the area and when it was not. This would go a long way in explaining some of the quirks of Greenland’s geography which remains hidden under kilometer-thick ice. There are no plans to try to drill down to the sediment, but now that scientists know the lake bed is there, it might not be long before someone decides to try.

Mike Wehner has reported on technology and video games for the past decade, covering the latest news and trends in virtual reality, wearable devices, smartphones, and future technologies. Most recently, Mike served as a technical writer at The Daily Dot and has been featured on USA Today, Time.com, and countless other websites and print. His love of reporting comes right after his gambling addiction.