100-Foot Deep Andes Lake Disappears

[Sean Ryan]

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/06 ... index.html

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) -- A five-acre glacial lake in Chile's southern Andes has disappeared -- and scientists want to know why.

Park rangers at Bernardo O'Higgins National Park said they found a 100-feet-deep crater in late May were the lake had been in March. Several large pieces of ice that used to float atop the water also were spotted.

"The lake had simply disappeared," Juan Jose Romero, head of Chile's National Forest Service in the southernmost region of Magallanes, said Wednesday. "No one knows what happened."

A group of geologists and other experts will be sent to the area 1,250 miles southeast of Santiago in the next few days to investigate, Romero said.

One theory is the water disappeared through cracks in the lake bottom into underground fissures. But experts do not know why the cracks would have appeared because there have been no earthquakes reported in the area recently, Romero said.

A river that flowed out of the lake was reduced to a trickle.

[Wayne Harrison]

<img src="http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/americas_enl_1182430703/img/1.jpg">
BBC

Scientists in Chile have blamed climate change for the sudden disappearance of a lake in the south of the country.

Park rangers who patrolled the area in the Magallanes region in March reported that the two-hectare (five-acre) glacial lake was its normal size.

But two months later they found a huge dry crater and stranded chunks of ice that previously floated on the water.

Experts now say melting glaciers put pressure on an ice wall that acted as a dam, causing it to give way.

Water in the lake flowed out of the breach into a nearby fjord and then out to the sea, said.

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