Antarctica may seem like a flat sheet of ice but beneath its icy exterior are rocky mountains, volcanoes, and canyons trapped beneath 1.4 miles of ice.
If you check out images of Antarctica today, it might seem like one long flat sheet of ice (except for the mountains and cliffs, of course).
Underneath, though, it’s a whole different story.
The ice over the top of everything is an average of 1.4 miles thick, but beneath it are rocky mountains, volcanoes, and canyons that have been trapped there for millions of years.
Satellite data and radar surveys have made it possible to see the topography of the bedrock with startling clarity, and we have a pretty amazing map known as BedMachine Antarctica.
The map was the culmination of years of research by 19 different institutes around the world, including NASA, the National Science Foundation, Australia’s Cooperative Research Centres Programme, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the British Antarctic Survey, to name a few.
Looking at it is like having X-ray vision, and the data from the map is a gold mine for scientific communities around the world.
One of the biggest surprises the research uncovered was how huge the Denman Glacier is actually – more than 11,500 feet below sea level, making it the deepest point on continental Earth.
Professor Mathieu Morlighem, an associate professor at the University of California Irvine, issued a statement on the finding back in 2019.
“Older maps suggested a shallower canyon, but that wasn’t possibly; something was missing. With conservation of mass, by combining existing radar survey and ice motion data, we know how much ice flows through the canyon – which, by our calculations, reaches 3,500 meters below sea level, the deepest point on land. Since it’s relatively narrow, it has to be deep to allow that much ice mass to reach the coast.”
The fact that Antarctica has volcanic tendencies also comes as a bit of a surprise to some, even though there are 138 volcanoes in West Antarctica alone.
Most are dormant, but around nine of them remain active to this day. Mount Erebus is 12,448 feet tall and is the southernmost active volcano on the planet.
So, it’s not as boring as it looks.
Which I would guess is true of a great many things in this world.
h/t James K.
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