Below the Antarctic ice lies an “unmodified” landscape that has been preserved “despite millions of years of ice cover,” according to a new study published in the journal Nature Communications. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) covers 12,000 square miles, and frozen under the surface is a “landscape of hills and valleys carved by ancient rivers,” AFP reported. “It is an undiscovered landscape — no one’s laid eyes on it,” said Stewart Jamieson, a glaciologist at Durham University and the lead author of the study. “What is exciting is that it’s been hiding there in plain sight.”
Scientists discovered the area by “trac[ing] out the valleys and ridges” using existing satellite images of the region, Jamieson said, along with a technique called radio-echo sounding, which is when a plane flies overhead and sends radio waves into the ice to analyze the echoes. “Given this discovery of an ancient landscape hidden in plain sight, and that of others, we propose that there will be other similar, as yet undiscovered, ancient landscapes beneath the EAIS,” the study noted.
Climate change has been slowly melting the EAIC, and that could eventually reveal the landscape that has been buried beneath for between 14 million to 34 million years, according to the researchers. Experts posit that before it was frozen in ice, the land had a “climate similar to modern-day southern South America,” with evidence of palm trees and other tropical vegetation, ABC News reported. “We understand the Moon better than East Antarctica,” University of Tasmania polar scientist Matt King, an expert on melting Antarctic ice, said last year. “So, we don’t yet fully understand the climate risks that will emerge from this area.”
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