Scientists have discovered an ancient lakebed buried under more than a mile of ice that may hold secrets to Greenland's past climate.
The lake formed when northwest Greenland was ice-free, sometime between hundreds of thousands or even millions of years ago. Given Greenland's rapid melt today, the lake could reveal something about the Arctic's future as the ice caps shrink.
"This could be an important repository of information, in a landscape that right now is totally concealed and inaccessible," Guy Paxman, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said in a statement. "We're working to try and understand how the Greenland ice sheet has behaved in the past. It's important if we want to understand how it will behave in future decades."
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