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by Spektrum der Wissenschaft
What does it really look like under the Antarctic ice?
24.1.2026
Translation: machine translated
What landscapes would dominate if all the ice in Antarctica disappeared? A new study reveals an unexpected hilly landscape.
High mountains, wide valleys - and a vast hilly landscape: this is what Antarctica would look like if it were completely ice-free. However, as it is currently 98 per cent covered by glaciers and huge ice sheets, the team led by Helen Ockenden from the University of Grenoble-Alpes needed high-resolution satellite images of the ice surface as well as data on the thickness and flow of the glaciers on the southern continent, to create a new, highly detailed image of the rocky surface around the South Pole: The resulting map is the most accurate yet of the topography of the hidden Antarctic.
For their analysis, the scientists fed their data into a model known as Ice Flow Perturbation Analysis. This calculates how the ice moves as it flows over the subsurface. It is influenced by hidden landscapes: hills and mountains compress and slow down the glaciers, valleys and gorges channel and accelerate them. This ultimately leaves traces on the surface of the ice, even if mountains are not exposed.
The high-resolution map by Ockenden and Co. reveals, for example, almost 72,000 hills under the ice, twice as many as were previously known. In contrast, other regions that have been insufficiently researched so far resemble rugged, alpine landscapes rather than the rolling hills that were previously thought to be there. In an area called Maud Subglacial Basin, the researchers also discovered a valley almost 400 kilometres long with steep but short slopes: The depression is only 50 metres deep on average, but six kilometres wide.
These structures influence the flow velocities of the glaciers: higher friction on their underside due to numerous elevations slows down the ice tongues, while valleys that dip steeply towards the ocean accelerate them. This data is in turn important in order to be able to more accurately assess the loss of ice due to climate change.
Other teams had previously discovered the deepest known canyon on the continents: It reaches down 3500 metres, making it currently the deepest point on earth on land. Only deep-sea canyons surpass this valley.
Spectrum of Science
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Original article on Spektrum.de
Header image: Shutterstock / Oleksandr Matsibura
Spektrum der Wissenschaft
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