The streams of water, some of which are 250m in height and stretch for hundreds of kilometres, could be destabilising parts of the Antarctic ice shelf immediately around them and speeding up melting, researchers said.
However, they added that it remains unclear how the localised effects of the channels will impact on the future of the floating ice sheet as a whole.
The British researchers used satellite images and radar data to measure variations in the height of the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in West Antarctica, which reveal how thick the ice is.
Writing in the Nature Geoscience journal, they described finding large rivers of meltwater beneath the floating ice shelf which had not previously been identified.
These channels lined up with areas where similar flows of water are thought to exist under the ice sheet, the ice formation which sits on solid ground, at the point where the land meets the sea.
Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk
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