This river landscape was 'frozen in time', hidden for millions of years, till global warming revealed it
East Antarctic Ice Sheet
An ancient river landscape has been revealed due to global warming. It was preserved underneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet for millions of years.
A new study, published on Tuesday (Oct 24) in Nature Communications, has unveiled that the landscape is bigger than Belgium.
The study further states that the land space has remained untouched for potentially more than 34 million years.
However, the British and American researchers have warned that human-led global warming could threaten to expose it.
Stewart Jamieson, a glaciologist at the UK's Durham University and the lead author of the study, told news agency AFP: "It is an undiscovered landscape - no one's laid eyes on it."
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"What is exciting is that it's been hiding there in plain sight," Jamieson added. He said that the researchers had not used new data, only a new approach.
Jamieson said that the land underneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is less well-known than the surface of Mars.
He said that the main way to "see" beneath it is by using the radio-echo-sounding technique, which means sending radio waves from overhead into the ice and analysing the echoes.
However,this comes with a challenge as doing this across the continent would pose a massive challenge as Antarctica is bigger than Europe.
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This graphic was published byNature Communications.
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Jamieson said that the researchers then used existing satellite images of the surface to "trace out the valleys and ridges" more than two kilometres below.
He added that the undulating ice surface is a "ghost image" that drapes gently over these spikier features.
An image emerged of a river-carved landscape of plunging valleys and sharply peaked hills when they combined with radio-echo-sounding data. It was similar to some currently on the Earth's surface.
Jamieson said that it was like looking out the window of a long-haul flight and seeing a mountainous region below. He said that the area was once home to trees, forests and probably animals, but then it got "frozen in time" after the ice came along.
The researchers are not sure when sunshine last touched this hidden world, but they assume that it has been at least 14 million years.