Environmental Science students’ longstanding cry that more is known about the surface of Mars than that of our own planet has come one step further to being relegated to history this month.
Led by Edinburgh’s Dr Helen Ockenden, researchers from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Geosciences and other European specialists, have used a revolutionary mapping technique to ‘see’ the true soil surface of Antarctica’s continent, buried below impenetrable glaciers.
Previous mapping attempts were limited by surveys on the ground, measuring ice depth or using radars to go under the ice sheet, which can reach heights of 5km. Such sub-glacial landscape would also be reconstructed by tracking glacier movement and the application of statistical models which attempted to explain how valleys and mountains might be situated under the ice sheet. But, applying these methods to map an entire continent is, for obvious reasons, challenging.
Since 2022, the researchers have worked on the development of the Ice Flow Perturbation Analysis (IFPA). They applied cutting-edge satellite data of the icy surface of glaciers to physical and mathematical models. Since these models can predict glacier movement to high accuracies the resulting map has an astonishing level of detail of Antarctica’s topography at the mesoscale (two to 30 km).
Their full work, with the resulting map, was published in the journal Science, exposing a buried landscape of soaring mountain ranges, yawning chasms and flatlands furrowed by gargantuan ice sheets above – all visible to a precision never before realised.
This is significant not just for the thrill of unveiling such a mysterious continent, but also for the huge implications this has on climate modelling and resource speculation.
With the melting patterns of polar ice referred to as “one of the biggest unknowns” of the consequences of climate change, understanding of solid land below rapidly-melting glaciers will be a tool to accurately model sea level rise, according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Indeed, some types of land formations below ice sheets seem to slow glaciers melting into the ocean, enabling to target areas which are more at risk of such dangerous phenomena. The relevance of such research is thus rapidly becoming less theoretical than it was a few decades ago.
The other huge implication of IFPA surely lies in the strategic use of land, which, with rising temperatures, is on the brink of being uncovered, becoming more exploitable. Today, a glaring example of the polar region’s rising geopolitical importance underpins the relationship between the climate emergency and military and industrial exploitation.