  We present results of a detailed investigation of the temperature dependence
of the spatial string tension in SU(2) gauge theory. We show, for the first
time, that the spatial string tension is scaling on the lattice and thus is
non-vanishing in the continuum limit. It is temperature independent below Tc
and rises rapidly above. For temperatures larger than 2Tc we find a scaling
behaviour consistent with sigma_s(T) = 0.136(11) g^4(T) T^2, where g(T) is the
2-loop running coupling constant with a scale parameter determined as Lambda_T
= 0.076(13) Tc.
