A lake with a surface area of between 4 and 5 hectares has mysteriously disappeared in Chile's southern Andes. The around-10-soccer-pitches-sized glacial lake was located in Bernardo O'Higgins National Park in the Magallanes region in Patagonia, South of Santiago and was fed mainly by melting glaciers water. "In March we patrolled the area and everything was normal ... we went again in May and to our surprise we found the lake had completely disappeared," said Juan Jose Romero, regional director of Chile's National Forestry Corporation CONAF.
"No one knows what happened," he added, "The only things left were chunks of ice on the dry lake-bed and an enormous fissure."
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, despite Chile having been shaken by thousands of minor earth tremors this year.
Source: Xinhua
