Introduction
Subglacial Lake Ellsworth is located near the Ellsworth Mountains in West Antarctica at 78.9°S 90.6°W. The lake basin is in the center of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) in the Pine Island Glacier drainage basin, 20 km from the ice divide with the Institute Ice Stream. The lake is believed to be approximately 10 km long and over 3 km across at its widest point. The gradient of the bed surrounding Lake Ellsworth is at least twice as great as the lake surface, which implies that the depth of the lake could be of the order of tens if not hundreds of meters (Siegert et al., 2004). The ice overlying the lake is between 3.2 and 3.4 km thick, suggesting that the lake surface is over 1 km beneath present sea level. Lake Ellsworth is located within a distinct topographic hollow, which is ∼1.5 km deeper than the surrounding bed. The basin is fjord like in its topographic setting, and is one of a series of fjord-like over-deepenings on the western flank of the Ellsworth...
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Acknowledgments
JW and MJS acknowledge funding by UK NERC grants NER/D008751/1 and NER/D008638/1.
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Woodward, J., Siegert, M.J., Smith, A.M., Royston-Bishop, G. (2012). Antarctic Subglacial Lake Ellsworth. In: Bengtsson, L., Herschy, R.W., Fairbridge, R.W. (eds) Encyclopedia of Lakes and Reservoirs. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4410-6_40
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