Mountains found under Antarctic ice cap
Australian scientists have shed new light on what lies beneath the ice in East Antarctica.
The ICECAP project is an international collaboration exploring what lies beneath a large slice of the East Antarctica ice sheet.
Scientists examining an area of about 1 million square miles south of Australia's Casey Station have found a striking landscape more than 1 kilometre below the ocean, with rugged mountain ranges and broad valleys.
Glaciologist Roland Warner says much of the Antarctic bedrock has never been surveyed properly.
"Our current project has been doing that with an ice-penetrating radar system mounted on an aeroplane, and this has allowed us to cover a lot more territory in a single summer," he said.
"Our interpretation of these is that these are fjords, although they're now buried underneath the ice sheet, and the way that those
fjords have come into existence is what's given us insights into the fact that the ice sheet must have been very different in the past."
The research will be used to develop computer models to predict ice sheet changes and future sea level rise.
Lead investigator Tas van Ommen says scientists expect a clearer picture of climate change impact to emerge from the research.
"The way it connects to the ocean is really important in building computer models of future changes to ice and sea level," he said.
Dr Warner agrees the findings have significant potential.
"It's going to give us a firm foundation for taking all the physics of how ice flows and applying that to working out how the present ice sheet will change in a warmer climate."
The research is being published this week in an international science journal.