Case of the missing lake

A five-acre glacial lake in Chile’s southern Andes has disappeared and nobody knows why.

Park rangers at the Bernardo O’Higgins National Park said they found a 100-feet-deep crater in late May where the lake had been in March. Several large pieces of ice that used to float on top of the water also were spotted.

A group of geologists and other experts will be sent to the area 1,250 miles southeast of Santiago in the next few days to investigate.

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.