“Walking Lakes” Found in Antarctica

An interesting phenomenon discovered in Antarctica left scientists baffled. They discovered that members of a set of teardrop-shaped lakes can move very fast across the landscape, at a speed of up to 1.5 meters (5 feet) each day. A walking lake, you might say, how preposterous!

That was my initial reaction as well, but apparently the lakes move about because they lie on the George VI ice shelf. The latter is a very active and mobile conglomerate of ice fronts and glaciers, which are slipping off the Southern Continent, and into the Southern Ocean.

Investigators actually made a looped video clip of how the lakes advance, using satellite data spanning back about a decade. Unfortunately, the video has not been released yet, but I'll upload it as soon as I find it. What’s extremely interesting is that some lakes moved independent of the ice shelf they're on.

“We found a subset of lakes that defied this in a spectacularly curious and interesting way, by moving parallel to a coastline of the George VI ice shelf,” says University of Chicago glaciologist Doug MacAyeal, the leader of the new study, as quoted by LiveScience.