- ‘Our analysis provides the first evidence that a huge canyon and a possible lake are present beneath the ice in Princess Elizabeth Land. It’s astonishing to think that such large features could have avoided detection for so long’
The canyon system is made up of a chain of winding and linear features buried under several kilometres of ice in one of the last unexplored regions of the Earth’s land surface — Princess Elizabeth Land (PEL) in East Antarctica.
“Our analysis provides the first evidence that a huge canyon and a possible lake are present beneath the ice in Princess Elizabeth Land. It’s astonishing to think that such large features could have avoided detection for so long,” said lead researcher Dr Stewart Jamieson from Durham University in Britain in a paper published in the journal Geology.Very few measurements of the ice thickness have been carried out in this particular area of the Antarctic, which has led to scientists dubbing it one of Antarctica’s two “Poles of Ignorance.”
The researchers believe that the landscape beneath the ice sheet has probably been carved out by water and is either so ancient that it was there before the ice sheet grew or it was created by water flowing and eroding beneath the ice. “This is a region of the Earth that is bigger than the UK and yet we still know little about what lies beneath the ice,” Jamieson added. In fact, the bed of Antarctica is less well known than the surface of Mars.
“If we can gain better knowledge of the buried landscape, we will be better equipped to understand how the ice sheet responds to changes in climate,” he noted. Faint traces of the canyons were observed using satellite imagery. The canyons may be connected to a previously undiscovered sub-glacial lake as the ice surface above the lake shares characteristics with those of large sub-glacial lakes previously identified.
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