Scientists Discover Ancient Landscape “Frozen in Time” under Antarctic Ice
Scientists made an astonishing announcement on Tuesday, revealing the unearthing of a vast and hidden landscape buried beneath the Antarctic ice. This remarkable discovery consists of hills and valleys that were carved by ancient rivers millions of years ago and have since remained “frozen in time.” The landscape, larger than Belgium, has been unexplored for an estimated 34 million years, but researchers warn that human-induced global warming could jeopardize its preservation.
Lead author of the study, Stewart Jamieson, a glaciologist at the University of Durham in the UK, expressed his excitement, stating, “It is an undiscovered landscape – no one has ever laid eyes on it.” Jamieson further emphasized that the groundbreaking discovery was not based on new data, but rather a new approach. The land beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is less understood than the surface of Mars, Jamieson asserted.
Traditionally, the primary method to explore the land beneath the ice is through radio-echo sounding, where radio waves are sent into the ice from a plane overhead, and the resulting echoes are analyzed. However, due to the immense size of Antarctica, this technique poses a tremendous challenge. Instead, the researchers employed existing satellite imagery to trace out the valleys and ridges located more than two kilometers below the surface.
Upon combining these images with radio-echo sounding data, the researchers unveiled a captivating image of a landscape shaped by ancient rivers, characterized by deep valleys and steep hills that resemble certain regions on Earth’s surface. Jamieson aptly likened the experience to looking out the window of an airplane during a long-haul flight and observing mountainous terrain below, comparing the hidden landscape to Wales’ Snowdonia area.
Stretching across an area of 32,000 square kilometers (12,000 square miles), this extraordinary landscape was once teeming with trees, forests, and likely animals. However, with the arrival of ice, it became trapped in time. Determining when sunlight last reached this hidden realm poses a challenge, but the researchers estimate that it has been at least 14 million years. Jamieson personally believes that the landscape was last exposed over 34 million years ago when Antarctica first froze over.
In light of their discovery, the researchers cautioned that global warming could pose a threat to this newly found landscape. In the journal Nature Communications, they wrote, “We are now on course to develop atmospheric conditions similar to those that prevailed between 14 to 34 million years ago,” during a period when temperatures were three to seven degrees Celsius warmer than the present. While the landscape is currently hundreds of kilometers away from the ice’s edge, rendering any potential exposure a distant event, it remains uncertain what the tipping point for a “runaway reaction” of melting would be.
This study follows a recent warning by scientists that the melting of the neighboring West Antarctic Ice Sheet is expected to accelerate significantly within the next few decades, irrespective of efforts to limit global warming. Earlier this year, a massive piece of Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf, the size of two New York Cities, broke free. The collapse of the Larsen C ice shelf, comparable in size to New York City, made headlines last year. Glacier experts have also voiced concerns that without a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, some of the world’s larger glaciers may vanish within a generation.
The visibility of these changes provides a more palpable understanding of the situation, as colossal glaciers shrink and disappear. Matthias Huss, the head of GLAMOS, an organization in Switzerland that monitors glaciers and collected data for the study, told CBS News, “People can really understand what is happening, with huge glaciers disappearing and shrinking. This is much more impressive than seeing another graph with rising temperatures.”
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