Ancient, River-Carved Landscape Revealed Under East Antarctic Ice Sheet
A recent study has discovered an ancient, river-carved landscape beneath East Antarctica’s ice sheet. This landscape provides a unique glimpse into the region before it was covered by glaciers. Satellite data reveals that a section near the Aurora and Schmidt subglacial basins has remained relatively untouched for up to 34 million years. The study’s lead author, Professor Stewart Jamieson from the University of Durham, described it as the “ghost of the landscape under the ice.” This discovery suggests that rivers once flowed through this area before the ice sheet formed.
Jamieson and his team used existing data to map the surface of the ice sheet and identify subtle changes in elevation that corresponded to the underlying landscape. This analysis revealed a hidden “island of topography” buried about 1.2 miles below the surface. The landscape is divided into three separate blocks by U-shaped valleys.
The blocks were likely once part of a continuous landmass, but the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana during the Cretaceous period may have caused them to separate. According to Jamieson, tectonic forces associated with the continent’s movement likely stretched and fractured the landscape into these distinct blocks.
(Image credit: Stewart Jamieson)
During a cooling period following the Cretaceous, it is believed that ice caps formed on top of each block. As these ice caps melted and water flowed down from the peaks, they carved out valleys leading toward the coast, which was then hundreds of kilometers away. The study, published in Nature Communications, suggests that this landscape was preserved when the massive ice sheet formed around 34 million years ago. According to Jamieson, this landscape is now “frozen in time.”
However, not all
