Scientists Uncover Secret Landscape Hiding Miles Below Antarctica's Ice

"By creating a new map of Antarctica's subterranean landscape, researchers have uncovered a vast topography of previously hidden hills, ridges, and even entire mountain ranges lurking miles beneath its frozen exterior. The findings, detailed in a new study published in the journal Science, could represent a novel method of probing the Antarctic ice that could be instrumental in predicting the frigid continent's fate amid rapid climate change."

"Previous approaches have relied on on-the-ground and aerial missions to use radar to sound out the continent's subsurface features. But the barren landscape is intimidatingly vast, and these missions can be separated by dozens of miles, leaving scientists with an incomplete picture, which itself can only really guess at what's trapped below all those miles of ice. According to an editor's summary of the study, the Antarctic's subsurface landscape is so mysterious that we know less about it than we do Mercury."

"Study coauthor Robert Bingham, a glaciologist at the University of Edinburg, provided an analogy. "If you imagined the Scottish Highlands or the European Alps were covered by ice and the only way to understand their shape was the occasional flight several kilometers apart," he told the BBC, "there's no way that you would see all these sharp mountains and valleys that we know to be there.""

A high-resolution subterranean map of Antarctica reveals vast, previously hidden bedrock topography including hills, ridges, and mountain ranges lying miles beneath the ice. Traditional ground and aerial radar surveys leave large gaps across the vast, barren continent, producing an incomplete picture of sub-ice features. Combining optical satellite imagery, radar data, and ice-flow models allows researchers to infer undulations in the bedrock more accurately. The improved subglacial map offers a stronger basis for understanding how the ice moves and responds, which can enhance predictions of Antarctic ice stability and its contribution to future sea-level rise amid warming.

Read at Futurism