"Antarctic Ice Reveals Ancient Secrets: Scientists Uncover a Frozen Landscape Preserved Across Millions of Years"

On Tuesday, scientists announced the discovery of a vast, hidden landscape of hills and valleys that has been preserved under the Antarctic ice for millions of years. The landscape, which is larger than Belgium, has remained untouched for over 34 million years. However, researchers have warned that human-driven global warming could potentially expose it. The lead author of the study, Stewart Jamieson, a glaciologist at Durham University, stated that the land underneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is less well known than the surface of Mars. The only way to "see" beneath it is through radio-echo sounding, a technique where a plane overhead sends radio waves into the ice and analyzes the echoes. The researchers did not use new data, only a new approach, and emphasized that this undiscovered landscape has been hiding in plain sight.

The enormity of the task of doing this across the continent, considering that Antarctica is bigger than Europe, would be a significant challenge. Therefore, the researchers utilized pre-existing satellite images of the surface to map out the valleys and ridges that were more than two kilometers below. According to Jamieson, the undulating ice surface is a "ghost image" that gently drapes over these spikier features. When combined with radio-echo sounding data, an image of a river-carved landscape of plunging valleys and sharply peaked hills emerged, similar to some currently on the Earth's surface. The area, which spans 32,000 square kilometers (12,000 square miles), was once home to trees, forests, and probably animals, but then the ice came along and froze it in time. The researchers are confident that it has been at least 14 million years since sunshine last touched this hidden world, and Jamieson believes that it was last exposed more than 34 million years ago when Antarctica first froze over. The team believes that there are other ancient landscapes down there yet to be discovered, having previously found a city-size lake under the Antarctic ice.

The authors of the study expressed concern about the potential threat that global warming could pose to the newly discovered landscape. They stated in the journal Nature Communications that current atmospheric conditions are on track to resemble those that existed between 14 to 34 million years ago, when temperatures were three to seven degrees Celsius warmer than they are now. This equates to roughly seven to 13 degrees Fahrenheit. The authors emphasized that the landscape is located hundreds of kilometers inland from the ice's edge, indicating that any potential exposure would be a considerable distance away. They also noted that previous instances of retreating ice during past warming events, such as the Pliocene period three to 4.5 million years ago, did not expose the landscape. This provided some hope for the future. However, the authors acknowledged that the tipping point for a "runaway reaction" of melting remains uncertain. The release of the study coincided with a warning from scientists that the melting of the nearby West Antarctic Ice Sheet is expected to accelerate significantly in the coming decades, even if global warming is limited as per current ambitions. This year, a large portion of Antarctica's Brunt Ice Shelf, approximately the size of two New York Cities, broke free. The Brunt Ice Shelf is situated across the Weddell Sea from the Larsen C ice shelf, which collapsed into the sea last year. Glacier experts have cautioned that without a substantial reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, some of the world's largest glaciers could disappear within a generation. These glaciers play a crucial role in providing water for crops, transportation, and millions of people across multiple continents as they gradually melt and feed rivers. Matthias Huss, the head of GLAMOS, an organization that monitors glaciers in Switzerland and collected the data for the study, highlighted the visibility of their impact.