By creating a new map of Antarctica’s subterranean landscape, researchers have uncovered a vast topography of previously hidden hills, ridges, and even entire mountain ranges lurking miles beneath its frozen exterior.

The findings, detailed in a new study published in the journal Science, could represent a novel method of probing the Antarctic ice that could be instrumental in predicting the frigid continent’s fate amid rapid climate change.

“It’s like before you had a grainy pixel film camera, and now you’ve got a properly zoomed-in digital image of what’s really going on,” lead author Helen Ockenden, a researcher at the University of Grenoble-Alpes in France, told the BBC.

Previous approaches have relied on on-the-ground and aerial missions to use radar to sound out the continent’s subsurface features. But the barren landscape is intimidatingly vast, and these missions can be separated by dozens of miles, leaving scientists with an incomplete picture, which itself can only really guess at what’s trapped below all those miles of ice.

According to an editor’s summary of the study, the Antarctic’s subsurface landscape is so mysterious that we know less about it than we do Mercury. Study coauthor Robert Bingham, a glaciologist at the University of Edinburg, provided an analogy.
By creating a new map of Antarctica’s subterranean landscape, researchers have uncovered a vast topography of previously hidden hills, ridges, and even entire mountain ranges lurking miles beneath its frozen exterior.

The findings, detailed in a new study published in the journal Science, could represent a novel method of probing the Antarctic ice that could be instrumental in predicting the frigid continent’s fate amid rapid climate change.

“It’s like before you had a grainy pixel film camera, and now you’ve got a properly zoomed-in digital image of what’s really going on,” lead author Helen Ockenden, a researcher at the University of Grenoble-Alpes in France, told the BBC.

Previous approaches have relied on on-the-ground and aerial missions to use radar to sound out the continent’s subsurface features. But the barren landscape is intimidatingly vast, and these missions can be separated by dozens of miles, leaving scientists with an incomplete picture, which itself can only really guess at what’s trapped below all those miles of ice.

According to an editor’s summary of the study, the Antarctic’s subsurface landscape is so mysterious that we know less about it than we do Mercury. Study coauthor Robert Bingham, a glaciologist at the University of Edinburg, provided an analogy.
By creating a new map of Antarctica’s subterranean landscape, researchers have uncovered a vast topography of previously hidden hills, ridges, and even entire mountain ranges lurking miles beneath its frozen exterior.

The findings, detailed in a new study published in the journal Science, could represent a novel method of probing the Antarctic ice that could be instrumental in predicting the frigid continent’s fate amid rapid climate change.

“It’s like before you had a grainy pixel film camera, and now you’ve got a properly zoomed-in digital image of what’s really going on,” lead author Helen Ockenden, a researcher at the University of Grenoble-Alpes in France, told the BBC.

Previous approaches have relied on on-the-ground and aerial missions to use radar to sound out the continent’s subsurface features. But the barren landscape is intimidatingly vast, and these missions can be separated by dozens of miles, leaving scientists with an incomplete picture, which itself can only really guess at what’s trapped below all those miles of ice.

According to an editor’s summary of the study, the Antarctic’s subsurface landscape is so mysterious that we know less about it than we do Mercury. Study coauthor Robert Bingham, a glaciologist at the University of Edinburg, provided an analogy.