quote: 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.
That is a lot of water to vanish in less then 2 months.
Posts: 3134 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: One of the Chinese brothers.
Gah! Which book is that from?! Is it called "The Five Chinese Brothers?"
edit: Found it, and yes it is! I haven't thought about that book in years, thanks for reminding me of such a fun book.
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posted
Chile, isn't that near where Jurrasic Park was set? Obviously, dinosaurs escaped from the island and drank it.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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Maybe it was "Letterman" with his amazing powers of letter changes, he changed the "Lake" into "Lace", and if that wasn't enough, then changed the "Lace" into "Lack" which is what we have, a lack of lake.
Then he realized this is in Chille, so it should all be in Spanish, and his head exploded.
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quote:The advance and retreat of glaciers is part of the normal dynamic of the Patagonian region but climate change was distorting the process, Mr Rivera said.
"This would not be happening if the temperature had not increased," he added.
I would argue that climate change is part of the process, not distorting it. He could blame human contributions to global climate change for distorting the process by distorting global climate change, but blaming climate change itself is misleading. Yes, a rise in local average temperature counts as a local climate change and will likely lead to changes in local glacial activity.
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