Water found under Antarctic ice to raise sea level forecasts

Scientists have detected a network of lakes and rivers of rapidly moving water under the thick ice sheet of West Antarctica, a discovery that will force a revision of predictions of global sea levels as the sheet melts due to climate change. The faster the water moves in the sub-glacial lakes the more quickly any melting ice from the heart of the continent will get into the open sea, causing water levels to rise.

The latest scientific report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that an uncertainty about how ice sheets responded to climate change was the biggest unknown in predicting sea levels around the world. "We can't make faithful predictions of what's going to happen to Antarctica unless we get this process understood," said Helen Fricker of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

"The old paradigm was that most of the Antarctic was frozen to its bed. In a few places there was free water at the bottom and that was lubricating fast ice flow and that was all very steady, nothing changed very much," Prof David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey said. But this view had become out of date. "Water is not moving around in a steady trickle but filling up in one place and bursting through to another and this process is more widespread than we thought," he said.

Dr Fricker said she was surprised by the results. "We thought these changes took place over years and decades, but we are seeing large changes over months."

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