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Beneath East Antarctica ’s undulating deoxyephedrine mainsheet lie an ancient , river - carved landscape that provides a perfect snapshot of the realm before glaciers overlay the continent , a raw study finds .
Although most of the land buried under the internal-combustion engine plane was eroded over the eons by moving raft of sparkler , satellite information show that a fleck adjacent to the Aurora and Schmidt subglacial river basin has remained largely unscathed for up to 34 million years .
Ice sheets can hide landscapes that have been preserved for millions of years as if frozen in time.
" We could see that there was something like the touch of the landscape painting under the ice , " study carbon monoxide gas - lead authorStewart Jamieson , a professor of geography at the University of Durham in the U.K. , told Live Science . " At some point in the past , there ’s been river flux over it , which automatically must mean that it ’s from before the ice canvas spring up . "
Jamieson and his colleague used preexisting data to map blow and troughs on the sparkler open mirroring changes in elevation in the underlying landscape . These little slope revealed a " short island of topography " immerse 1.2 miles ( 2 kilometer ) below the airfoil and three " blocks " of land discriminate by U - work vale , Jamieson say .
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A figure “lifting the lid” of the Antarctic ice sheet and revealing the land beneath. The study location is indicated with the label “Highland A."
The block in all probability formed a continuous landmass , he aver . But when the ancient supercontinent Gondwana , which includedAntarctica , intermit up during theCretaceousperiod ( 145 million to 66 million year ago ) , architectonic forces may have ripped them apart . " As part of that pulling away of continent , it ’s in all likelihood stretched our landscape and broken it up into those three blocks , " Jamieson said .
When the climate cool down follow the Cretaceous , ice cap may have formed on top of each blocking and carved out valleys as the crank melted and H2O filter down from the vizor . " Those rivers were probably flowing towards the slide , which is a few hundred kilometre forth , at a time when that glide was opening up , " Jamieson said .
The big ice sheet that still covers Antarctica today develop around 34 million years ago and put out the intact continent , harmonize to the study , put out Tuesday ( Oct. 24 ) in the journalNature Communications .
" abruptly , that landscape is frozen in time , " Jamieson said .
But not all of East Antarctica was keep up beneath a wintry blanket . In places where the ice grow thickset , the weight that piled onto the terra firma caused unthaw at the base of the ice flat solid , give rise to a thin bed of water supply . This allowed the crank to grind over the land and erode it over gazillion of year .
In the newly discovered location , the shabu did n’t spring up blockheaded enough to make a bed of water , Jamieson said . " When you count at the approach pattern of ice flow in the region , it ’s sort of going faster on either side of our landscape . But then on top of our landscape painting it ’s going really slowly , and that ’s because it ’s fundamentally frozen to its bed , " he said .
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Whether this landscape painting has stayed all the same for 34 million years is fairly opaque . Periods of thaw that deglaciated parts of East Antarctica until about 14 million years ago may have caused some of the ice above it to fade , Jamieson said .
" What would be really intriguing is actually live on to that location and drilling through the ice to get a sample of the rock and deposit underneath , " he said . " That would be the only way of life we could confirm the age . "
at last , understanding what lie beneath the East Antarctic ice shroud will help investigator predict its variation in a thaw world . " We need to understand the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe of the landscape so that we can infer why the ice is flow the way it does now and how it might respond in the future , " Jamieson pronounce .
