There is an entire world sitting beneath Antarctica's ice — and it hasn't seen sunlight in 34 million years.
Scientists have made one of the most jaw-dropping geological discoveries of our time. Hidden more than a mile below the East Antarctic ice sheet, in a region called Wilkes Land, researchers have mapped a prehistoric landscape so vast it rivals the size of Maryland — and it has been completely untouched since before humans, before mammoths, before almost everything we know on this Earth today.
Using satellite data and radar powerful enough to see straight through ice, scientists pieced together a stunning picture of what lies beneath — towering highland formations, valleys plunging nearly 4,000 feet deep, and ancient river channels that once carried water across a warm, forested continent.
Because Antarctica wasn't always frozen. Tens of millions of years ago, it was warm. It was green. It was alive.
And here's what makes this truly extraordinary — that landscape is still there. Almost perfectly intact. Most glaciers grind and erode everything beneath them as they move, but the ice sitting above this particular region has been so cold and so still for so long that it has acted as a natural time capsule, preserving the terrain exactly as it was the moment the freeze began.
Scientists are now preparing to drill down through the ice to retrieve ancient soil samples that could rewrite everything we know about Earth's climate history.
One tiny core of ancient earth. Millions of years of answers.
This is why science never gets old. Share this with someone who needs a reminder of just how extraordinary our planet truly is
Source: Jamieson et al. (2023), Nature Communications