Researchers have created the most detailed map to date of the terrain beneath Antarctica’s vast ice sheet, revealing an unexpectedly rich and rugged landscape concealed under kilometres of ice.
The planet’s largest single ice sheet spans more than five million square miles.
The hidden land includes mountains, deep valleys, plains and tens of thousands of previously unknown hills — not just the flat, featureless base that was once assumed.
Scientists said the findings could help experts predict how the ice sheet changes in response to warming.
The team combined high-resolution satellite observations with a technique called Ice Flow Perturbation Analysis, which uses ice surface characteristics and the physics of how ice moves to estimate the shape of the ground below.
This approach allows scientists to infer subglacial topography even where direct radar measurements haven’t reached.
Professor Robert Bingham, a glaciologist at the University of Edinburgh who co-authored the study, said: ‘I’m just so excited to look at that and just see the whole bed of Antarctica at once.
He said: ‘Over millions of years Antarctica’s ice sheet has sculpted a landscape consisting variously of flat plains, dissected plateaus and sharp mountains, all hidden under the present miles–thick ice cover.
‘With this technique we are able to observe for the first time the relative distributions of these highly variable landscapes over the whole continent.’
The new method has revealed tens of thousands of previously undiscovered hills and ridges and provided more information about some of those mountains and canyons hidden beneath the ice.
Lead author Dr Helen Ockenden, a researcher at the University of Grenoble-Alpes, said: ‘I think it’s just really super interesting to look at all these new landscapes and see what’s there.
The study, published in the academic journal Science, is unlikely to provide the definitive answer as to what lies beneath the ice.