{"id":695865,"date":"2026-06-10T15:47:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T15:47:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/695865\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T15:47:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T15:47:16","slug":"scientists-found-a-continent-sized-geological-structure-hiding-beneath-antarctica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/695865\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Found a Continent-Sized Geological Structure Hiding Beneath Antarctica"},"content":{"rendered":"

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost unfathomably huge. Covering about 75% of the entire frigid continent (nearly everything on its side of the Transantarctic Mountains), the sheet covers about 3.9 million square miles (10.2 million square kilometers) and extends down 1.4 miles (2.2 km), on average, before coming into contact with Earth\u2019s surface. At its deepest, the ice plunges<\/a> down over 3 miles (4.9 km).<\/p>\n

For decades, scientists assumed that this literally continent-sized block of ice rested<\/a> on an expansive and stable chunk of Earth\u2019s crust known as a craton<\/a>. A team of researchers has now complicated that picture\u2014mapping a vast, interconnected geological structure that fans out from a troubling \u201ctectonic deformation.\u201d Beneath this ice sheet, thinner and more geologically recent slices of crusty lithosphere<\/a> fan out into hidden valleys called \u201cpull-apart basins.\u201d<\/p>\n

These basins\u201430 elongated wedge-shaped valleys in total\u2014constitute an entirely new, continental-scale geological region underneath Antarctica, in fact, one which the researchers have named the East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province (EAFBP). But it\u2019s how they likely formed that has now caught researchers\u2019 attention.<\/p>\n

To put it bluntly, it turns out that about 90%<\/a> of the planet\u2019s fresh water ice may not be on solid ground. Geologist John Goodge called the team\u2019s findings \u201cprovocative\u201d in an independent commentary<\/a> on the new study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Geoscience.<\/p>\n

\u201cEast Antarctica is typically considered from seismic tomography and geodetics to be ancient and generally stable,\u201d according to Goodge, who studies continental tectonics with the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute. \u201c[But] something else is going on at depth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Continental divides <\/p>\n

Goodge speculates that this seemingly \u201ccoherent pull-apart system,\u201d as presented in the new study, might help explain a variety of mysterious heat<\/a> and water flows beneath this ice sheet\u2019s surface, like that enormous subglacial lake identified in 2016<\/a> or some of the hundreds more<\/a> like it.<\/p>\n

The study\u2019s authors, led by geophysicist Egidio Armadillo at the University of Genoa in Italy, agreed: \u201cBecause these basins underlie about half of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, they are likely to heavily influence both ice-flow and landscape evolution,\u201d the researchers wrote in their study<\/a>, also published Thursday in Nature Geoscience.<\/p>\n

Armadillo\u2019s team, coordinating across Europe and the U.K., developed their new understanding of Antarctica\u2019s hidden bedrock via an exhaustive set of sensory data. Gravitational<\/a> and magnetic<\/a> anomalies were mapped via low-altitude airborne surveys. Ground surface features were mapped with seismic<\/a> tools, using sound waves that vibrate through the ice and ping back information about subglacial landscapes in 3D.<\/p>\n

\"EastThe grey, magenta, and cyan lines represent the apparent new fault lines discovered. Credit: Nature Geoscience <\/p>\n

All of this data\u2014the fruits of \u201cmulti-national efforts to image within and below the ice sheet,\u201d as Goodge put it\u2014had already revealed that regions of the continent were \u201cundergoing more rapid movement and ice-mass loss than previously recognized.\u201d Armadillo\u2019s team merely helped to explain why.<\/p>\n

The mechanism Armadillo and his colleagues proposed for the formation of these fan-shaped basins is called \u201cdistributed rotational extension.\u201d It involves points called Euler poles around which tectonic plates pivot or rotate rather than smash into each other or pull apart. The result is a bit like decks of cards being spread out on a table, thinning out the stack of Earth\u2019s crust as it moves.<\/p>\n

An icy situation <\/p>\n

Goodge took pains to spell out the basins\u2019 implications for melting Antarctic ice due to climate change and the risk of rising global sea levels.<\/p>\n

The mere existence of these basins, he wrote, \u201ccould introduce widespread, systemic instability to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet\u201d via thinner layers of Earth\u2019s crust and more heat flow from below. On top of that, a series of fault-line \u201ctroughs\u201d documented between the basins appear \u201ctailor-made to promote outward flow of ice streams from the interior\u201d into the world\u2019s oceans, he said.<\/p>\n

That said, the team\u2019s findings are unlikely to end this debate. As Goodge noted, Antarctica is \u201cthe last continental frontier of scientific exploration.\u201d It\u2019s still a very mysterious place, one that\u2019s challenging to study given its inhospitable temperatures and extreme geography. Its \u201ccryptic subglacial geology\u201d might stay that way for a while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost unfathomably huge. Covering about 75% of the entire frigid continent (nearly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":695866,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[9348,12879,6054,38956,79],"class_list":["post-695865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-antarctica","tag-geology","tag-mapping","tag-plate-tectonics","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/695866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}