Researchers discover hidden landscape bigger than Belgium 'frozen in time' under Antarctic ice

Today, Antarctica is a gigantic chunk of Earth blanketed by an icy-white sheet. But millions of years ago, it was a warm, lush wilderness where wild dinosaurs roamed. Around 34 million years ago, glaciation triggered the freezing of its waters. But just before ice enveloped the entire continent, rivers sculpted a landscape with their flow. Eventually, this landscape got locked under ice and disappeared from the view of human eyes.

Entombed under ice, the landscape didn’t see the light of the day for what seemed like an eternity. But after so many years, it finally rose to the surface and caught the attention of some curious geographers. In a study published October 2023 in the journal Nature Communications, geographers explain how they unearthed this landscape “frozen in time” using a big-budget technology, reports ABC News. And now it is on the verge of breaking free.

The land beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is the landmass that hasn’t revealed much of its history. Scientists know more about Mars and the Moon than they know about this glassy landmass. That’s why Stewart Jamieson, the lead author of the study, was surprised to find that the mysterious landscape had been hiding in plain sight. Jamieson, a glaciologist at the UK’s Durham University, told CBS News, "It is an undiscovered landscape — no one's laid eyes on it."

According to ABC News, the landscape was first discovered in 2011, but Jamieson and his fellow researchers wanted to examine it in more detail. The typical method of detecting anomalies beneath the ice is “radio-echo sounding,” in which a plane flying overhead sends radio signals below and then tracks echoes on the surface. But this method wasn’t sufficient to scan a continent like Antarctica that is larger than Europe.

So, they combined the radio-echo-sounding data with existing satellite imagery data to trace out the valleys, bumps, ridges, and troughs stashed beneath the surface of the ice. According to VICE, this data was collected from the Canadian satellite constellation RADARSAT. RADARSAT is a spacecraft designed to detect little anomalies in ice-coated land. For instance, a sprinkle of ancient mountains hiding beneath ice sometimes leaves tiny bumps on the ice that are not spottable from the ground but from space. “The undulating ice surface is a ‘ghost image’ that drapes gently over these spikier features,” Jamieson described to CBS News.

Per ABC News, this data revealed that the area contained "three distinct landscape blocks", ranging between 75 miles long to about 107 miles long. Within these blocks, lay large-sized valleys and V-shaped troughs carved into the Earth by glaciers. Jamieson suggested that these features were etched into the land around 66 million years ago. This area, stretching to 12,000 square miles, was once home to trees, forests, and of course, dinosaurs. But then the ice came along, and it was "frozen in time," Jamieson told CBS News.

The most remarkable thing about the landscape is that it has remained preserved for millions of years and probably hasn’t melted a bit in the last 14 million years. “Although in a lot of areas, landscapes like this would be scrubbed away by glacial erosion that’s happening underneath the ice sheet, in this particular location, glacial erosion doesn’t seem to be switched on,” Jamieson said, per VICE. “It’s not sliding. It’s not filing off the landscape. It’s just frozen sitting there, like a protective cap.”

Jamieson also noted that accelerating global warming could pose a threat to this newly-discovered landscape. He added that the Earth is now approaching similar warm conditions that existed 14 to 34 million years ago. However, he is not sure about what’s the tipping point of climatic conditions that will trigger a runaway reaction in the ice sheet, causing it to melt away. What was once hushed into quietness under brittle ice is now at the edge of breaking free, once again!