About 98 percent of the Antarctic continent is covered with ice, and most of the land mass is under this ice. But thanks to some incredible imaging techniques, it’s possible to gain a deeper understanding of what the Antarctic continent would look like without ice.
The project, called Bedmap2, was created in 2013 by NASA and the British Antarctic Survey using vast amounts of data on surface height, ice thickness and bedrock topography from satellites, aircraft and surface-based surveys.
Beneath the Antarctic ice sheet lies a rugged terrain covered with mountain ranges, gorges and jagged areas, the map shows. Remarkably, part of the bed beneath the Byrd Glacier in Victoria Land lies 2,870 meters below sea level, meaning it is the lowest point on any of Earth’s continental plates.
Peter Fretwell of the British Antarctic Survey said in 2013: “The bedmap shows in unprecedented detail the bedrock beneath Antarctica’s ice sheets. “We didn’t have a regional overview of topography before, but this new map shows the terrain itself, with its much higher resolution, a complex landscape of mountains, hills and rolling plains divided by valleys, troughs and deep gorges.”
The device called the Multi-Channel Compatible Radar Depth Sounder, which can determine the ice thickness and subglacial topography by penetrating the ice, was one of the important tools used to collect this data.
Determining the shape of this subglacial world is critical to understanding how it affects how ice is distributed and how it will melt in the face of rising oceans and air temperatures due to climate change. “Ice sheets grow from snow and spread out like honey poured onto a plate and become thinner because of their own weight,” said Sophie Nowicki, ice sheet scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, in a statement. important unknown and affecting how ice can flow. By changing how you hold your plate, you can influence how the honey spreads on your plate.”
Bedmap2 data shows that Antarctica contains 27 million cubic kilometers of frozen water, which would cause sea level to rise by about 58 meters if it melted.
Although current climate forecasts do not suggest that the Antarctic ice sheet will melt completely, it can clearly be seen that it is slowly thawing at a shocking rate. Recent estimates show that the world’s oceans are now rising by 4 millimeters each year as a result of melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. This is believed to be almost exactly the same as the “worst case scenario” put forward at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
To better understand the ice thickness and the world below Antarctica, scientists are now developing Bedmap3.
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