Land Found In Antarctica

Scientists have recently uncovered a hidden landscape buried deep beneath the ice in East Antarctica. This land, located in a region called Wikes Land, has been trapped beneath more than a mile of ice for millions of years. Even though it’s completely frozen today, the area was once a green and forested environment with flowing rivers. 

Using advanced satellite images and special radar technology, researchers were able to map the land beneath the ice without ever seeing it directly. What they found was surprising to the public. Examiners found sharp valleys, tall ridges, and river carved terrain that looks more like a place on earth today than a frozen continent. The landscape is about the same size as Belgium, making it one of the largest preserved landforms ever discovered under ice. 

“The tropical aspect under the ice goes back to the moving of the continents, so the idea that if we are finding things that are tropical in Antarctica that means that at some point it needed to be somewhere, where those kinds of things survived. So that land mass would've had to have been closer to the equator or perhaps the polar regions had a different type of climate. But, that’s one of the reasons why we are able to find fossils of tropical things in those regions because of the movement of the plates; so the convection of the mantle allows the plates to move in different areas,” Physical Science teacher Elizabeth Klaube said.

Scientists believe this terrain is between 14 and 34 million years old, dating back to a time when Antarctica was transitioning from a warmer climate into the frozen desert we now know. What makes this discovery so special is how well the land has been preserved. The ice above it is “cold based,” meaning it stayed frozen to the ground and didn’t scrape or erode the land below, acting like a protective shield. 

This discovery gives scientists a rare look into Antarctica’s past and helps them understand how earth’s climate had changed over time. By studying this ancient landscape, researchers can also make better predictions about how Antarctica’s ice sheets might react to future climate warming.

“If we have been able to find this land under the ice with climate change being such a big idea right now, All of this ice is melting, and then turning into water which is going to allow for more lands to show.” Klaube said, “It allows for more questions. I feel like if climate change is going to be continuing in the way that it is then I feel like more questions are going to surface and with that perhaps more discoveries are going to be made.”

What people don’t know or understand about Antarctica is that it's the world’s largest desert, receiving less than 40 mm of precipitation a year. Areas like the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica have not seen rain in millions of years, making them almost as relative as the surface of Mars. 

NHS Science teacher Trent Harrison discussed how the weather as we see it in Antarctica (thunderstorms, hurricanes, snow, hail) as these processes are how the earth keeps the atmosphere in balance with heat and cold. As the earth changes, so does the weather and as we have more extreme temperature changes, we have more extreme storms to try to regulate and keep the climate in balance. During the Oligocene and Eocene time periods, the formation of Polar ice began to stabilize our climate. The earth without polar ice had major climate fluctuations, which did not create a stable atmosphere which in turn did not allow animals to thrive above the oceans.

“The oceans were more regulated in terms of temperature, salinity and therefore had more stable conditions to allow life to evolve and thrive. Once polar ice formed, and the Earth's climate regulated, grasslands formed, and mammals could prosper and thrive.  Earth has had a stable climate for millions of years allowing for the evolution of life as we know it today. Extinctions are natural and necessary. As the climate stabilizes, so must the biodiversity. If the earth returns back to a warmer climate, there will be extinctions due to the shifting of biomes, and the eradication of many temperate zones which provide food and shelter for land animals…But the oceans will remain relatively unharmed. Human impact is what is destroying the ocean environments,” Harrison said.

The surface is bone-dry, radar surveys have revealed hundreds of lakes and flowing rivers beneath the ice, kept liquid by geothermal heat and immense pressure. Underneath the ice there’s a massive, ancient, and frozen landscape of mountains and valleys that was covered by ice sheet expansion millions of years ago. Despite the dark conditions, scientists have discovered ecosystems, including microbes in buried lakes and strange sea life hanging beneath ice shelves. The desert underneath is not completely frozen; volcanoes like Mount Erebus have existed for over 1.3 million years, which creates small amounts of warmth in the ocean.