It's known that water melts from the glacier into the north end of the lake and freezes onto the underside of the glacier at the south end.
In a recent paper published in Nature Geoscience, his team identified two deep underwater cavities beneath the glacier that they note could be pathways for relatively warm ocean water to reach the underside of the glacier, enhancing its melting.
It's the point on the underside of the glacier where its base loses contact with the underlying ground.
The water then lubricates and melts the underside of the glacier, causing them to detach from the bedrock -- and creating a 'slip-n-slide' for glaciers that weigh in the megatons -- some the size of Manhattan.
Streams gushed from the melting underside of highland glaciers into basins, according to the author, creating ice-packed oceans that sublimated and then snowed back onto the highlands.
Eric Rignot, professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, said that the glacier was "being hit from above and below", with rising air temperatures driving melting at the top of the glacier, and its underside being eroded away by ocean currents that are warmer now than in the past.
"The top of the glacier is melting away as a result of decades of steadily increasing air temperatures, while its underside is compromised by currents carrying warmer ocean water.
"The top of the glacier is melting away as a result of decades of steadily increasing air temperatures, while its underside is compromised by currents carrying warmer ocean water, and the glacier is now breaking away into bits and pieces and retreating into deeper ground".
A recent study, from a different research group at BAS, indicated that year-to-year variability in the melting of the glacier was very sensitive to the amount of warm ocean-bottom water reaching the ice shelf's underside.
Oxygen could get trapped in surface snow, be buried in the glacier, and finally seep into Lake Vostok when ice melts off the underside of the ice.
"The top of the glacier is melting away as a result of decades of steadily increasing air temperatures," according to senior author Eric Rignot, "while its underside is compromised by currents carrying warmer ocean water, and the glacier is now breaking away into bits and pieces and retreating into deeper ground". .
