“It’s an undiscovered landscape – no one has ever seen it,” says Professor Stewart Jamieson, a glaciologist at Durham University and lead author of the study, in The Guardian. The area extends over 32,000 km², which is larger than Belgium. The area was once home to trees, forests and probably animals. Then the ice came and it became “frozen in time,” Jamieson said. “What’s exciting is that it’s hiding out there in plain sight,” he adds.
The researchers used existing satellite images of the surface to “trace the valleys and ridges” that lie more than 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) below, Jamieson said. Combined with the radio wave data, a picture emerged of a river-carved landscape with valleys and hills with sharp peaks, similar to some other places on the Earth’s surface.
It is difficult to determine when the hidden world last saw the sun, but researchers believe it was at least 14 million years ago. In fact, Jamieson suspects that it has been more than 34 million years since the area was last exposed, when Antarctica first froze over.
A lake the size of a city has previously been found beneath the Antarctic ice. The research team believes there are other ancient landscapes hidden beneath the ice that have remained undiscovered.
The scientists fear that global warming could threaten their newfound landscape. Although the fact that retreating ice during previous warming events – such as the Pliocene, 3 to 4.5 million years ago – did not expose the landscape, it is encouraging, according to Jamieson.
