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WONDERS OF NATURE
Bunger Oasis. Nature miracle
Only twice in the history of the discovery of the Earth, the most important geographical discoveries were made not by land travelers or seafarers, but by pilots. In 1935, the fearless Englishman Jimmy Angel (in the Spanish pronunciation Angel) discovered the highest waterfall in the world in the mountains of Venezuela, and in 1947, the American David Bunger, while exploring the coast of Antarctica, landed his seaplane on a large lake in the center of the "oasis" he discovered at the edge for the first time. ice continent. Both of these objects were named after the pilots who discovered them. But if the waterfalls, although not so high, were well known to people before Angel's flight, then the discovery of an oasis in the "country of eternal ice" became one of the most important geographical discoveries of the XNUMXth century.
The oasis in this case is not a poetic image or an exaggeration. Indeed, on the continent hidden under the ice armor, for the first time, a vast expanse was discovered, free from ice and snow, dotted with lakes and rocks, crossed by merrily murmuring streams - a true oasis of life in an icy desert. The dimensions of the Bunger oasis are fifty by twenty kilometers, and the area reaches seven hundred and fifty square kilometers. If we compare it with the European countries we are familiar with, this is a third of Luxembourg or two and a half of Malta. The discovery of Bunger aroused great interest, and in recent years, scientists from many countries have been studying the oasis. In 1956-1958, the Soviet polar station Oasis worked here, thanks to which many secrets of this mysterious corner of Antarctica were revealed. The Bunger oasis is located in the eastern part of Queen Mary Land, three hundred and sixty kilometers from the Russian station Mirny, at sixty-six degrees south latitude. Only twenty kilometers separate it from the Antarctic Circle. When you fly up to the oasis by plane or helicopter, the spectacle of blue and green lakes sparkling in the sun and black rocky hills separated by gray rocky basins seems simply unreal at first. Particularly striking is the view of this unusual landscape in contrast to the endless white glacial plain surrounding it on all sides. The oasis is even more surprising with a closer acquaintance. Stepping on its land, the traveler sees in front of him a very rugged terrain, dotted with hills up to two hundred meters high and many rocky elevations-hills, between which there are shallow depressions, at the bottom of many of which lakes gleam. The appearance of the landscape resembles the high-altitude deserts of Tibet or the Eastern Pamirs. The similarity is enhanced by the fact that warm air rises from the heated rocks upwards, and the horizon trembles, as often happens in a real desert. Indeed, in summer, at the height of the polar day, the air in the oasis warms up to four degrees Celsius, and on the surface of the rocks the temperature reaches plus twenty-five! The ascending currents of heated air, cooling at altitude, daily form a white cumulus cloud over the oasis, which never happens in other regions of Antarctica. Stone mounds in the oasis, randomly scattered, bear traces of glacier processing: transverse furrows, strokes and scratches, smoothed tops. The glacier dragged and left in the basins and on the slopes placers of granite boulders, very similar to those found in Karelia or the Pskov region. The lakes of the Bunger oasis are divided into two groups. Some of them, the largest, are filled with fresh water and relatively deep. In sunny weather, their surface sparkles with a bright blue. Shallow small lakes are usually salty and have a greenish color. The water temperature in them reaches plus eleven degrees, while in large fresh water bodies it is only two or three degrees above zero. The color of small lakes is explained by the rapid development of the smallest algae and microorganisms in them, which give the water a greenish tint. But on land, the Bunger oasis is poor in organic life. Mosses and lichens grow at the foot and in the cracks of the rocks, and in the deep crevices of the hills, beautiful white birds - snow petrels - lay their eggs and hatch their chicks. In addition to them, predatory skua gulls also live in the oasis - the main enemies of petrels. Only occasionally come across the shores of the largest lake in the oasis (the same one on which Banger "splashed" at one time) individual specimens of penguins and seals. Why are these most numerous inhabitants of the Antarctic coast so few in the oasis? The fact is that the reservoir in question is actually not a lake, but a bay, separated from the open ocean by a wide forty-kilometer-long bridge of the Shackleton Ice Shelf. Only a few particularly stubborn penguins and seals can cross it. But how did such an unusual landscape form among the ice-covered continent? Various hypotheses have been put forward on this subject. Some scientists believed that the territory of the oasis thawed out under the influence of volcanic heat. After all, it is known that there are active volcanoes in three places off the coast of Antarctica. Perhaps in the area of the oasis there is a shallow volcanic chamber, which melted the ice. Other researchers have suggested that the heating of the surface of the Bunger oasis is caused by an underground fire in coal seams, which have been identified by geologists in many areas of Antarctica. Similar fires are also known in other places on the planet, for example, in the Tien Shan or in the mountains of Bashkiria. But it turned out that in the vicinity of the Bunger oasis there are no signs of volcanism, and no coal deposits either. In fact, the cause of the emergence of an ice-free land area turned out to be the terrain. It is known that glaciers flow from the mainland to the ocean along uneven terrain, and in the region of the oasis, the elevations are located in such a way that they force glacial flows to flow down the hollows, skirting it from two sides. And when the era of general climate warming began, which continues to this day, the "local" glacier that existed on the site of the oasis melted, and new portions of ice moving from the center of Antarctica could not get here. This is how this unusual piece of cold rocky desert arose among the ice. Ironically, in such an environment, it really seems like an oasis, and for half a century it continues to attract the attention of scientists and individual, especially inquisitive, representatives of the world of birds and pinnipeds. Author: B.Wagner
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