Glacial Lake Vanishes in Southern Chile

[Jag]

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...=1&image=large

Jun 21 02:09 AM US/Eastern



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.


Odd....
Jag

[Sean Osborne]

The mystery in this appears to be a "no brainer." A fissure in the earths crust must have opened directly under the lake and the water drained into the earth below. Gravity sucks.

Another view of the lake before it drained.




The Puerto Natales region is in Chile, due west of the Falkland Islands (Las Malvina to the Argentines) as you can see below:



The general region is a meeting point for at least 4 tectonic plates which are each a different type of tectonic boundary (Extensional, Compressional and Transformal): (clockwise) the South American Plate, the Scotia Plate, the Antartica Plate and the Nazca Plate, seen below.




The earth is moving under Chilean feet.