Beneath nearly two kilometres of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, locked away since the continent froze over at least 34 million years ago, scientists have found something that changes the way researchers understand both Antarctica's distant past and its near-term future. Using ice-penetrating radar gathered across multiple airborne survey campaigns, an international team led by Durham University has mapped a vast ancient landscape stretching along 3,500 kilometres of the East Antarctic margin, a terrain of 31 separate flat surfaces, formed by rivers that once flowed freely across what is now the most remote and ice-covered continent on Earth. The study, published in Nature Geoscience , is the first to identify these surfaces at this scale, and what the researchers found is not simply a record of a warmer, wetter Antarctica. These buried plains appear to be actively influencing how the ice above them moves today, slowing the flow of glaciers in ways that current climate models have not accounted for, and complicating projections of how much sea level will rise as the world continues to warm.
