Hydro-fracture occurs when liquid water, denser than ice, exerts sufficient extra pressure on cracks in ice shelves to open them right through to the ocean below.
Scientists in Australia and the United States are reporting the sudden loss of a large ice-covered Antarctic lake covering an area of eleven square kilometres. The rare event occurred during the winter of 2019 on Amery Ice Shelf in East Antarctica and was noticed in satellite images the following summer by Dr Roland Warner from the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership at the University of Tasmania.
Dr Warner said that the event, detailed in a paper just published in Geophysical Research Letters, was most likely caused by a process known as ‘hydro-fracturing’.