Our geographers have discovered the remains of landscapes thought to have formed when ancient rivers flowed across East Antarctica.
These flat surfaces, buried beneath a 3,500km stretch of the East Antarctic coastline, could help predictions of future loss from the ice sheet.
An international team led by Durham University examined radar measurements of ice thickness to reveal the previously unmapped landscapes.
These surfaces were once connected and it’s believed were formed by large rivers after East Antarctica and Australia broke apart approximately 80 million years ago, and before ice covered Antarctica about 34 million years ago.
The surfaces are now hidden beneath the ice sheet and separated by deep troughs, which fast-flowing glaciers are steered through. The ice above the surfaces is moving much more slowly.
Ice loss from Antarctica is increasing, but the flat surfaces act as barriers to ice flow and may currently be regulating the rate of ice loss.
The landscape hidden beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is one of the most mysterious not just on Earth, but on any terrestrial planet in the solar system. Information such as the shape and geology of the newly mapped surfaces will help improve our understanding of how ice flows at the edge of East Antarctica. This in turn will help make it easier to predict how the East Antarctic Ice Sheet could affect sea levels under different levels of climate warming in the future.
Configuration of East Antarctica, Australia, and India prior to continental break-up. Red outlines show the flat surfaces mapped in this study (credit Dr Guy Paxman).
East Antarctica has the potential to raise global sea levels by 52 metres if it were to melt completely.
Adding the newly discovered surfaces’ effects into models of future ice-sheet behaviour could help refine projections of how the East Antarctic Ice Sheet might react to climate change and what its impact on global sea levels could be.
The research is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
More about research lead author Dr Guy Paxman, a Royal Society University Research Fellow in our Department of Geography.
Our Department of Geography is ranked 11th in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2025. Visit our Geography webpages for more information on our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, the European Research Council, the AWI INSPIRES III programme and the Natural Science Foundation of China.
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