It was frozen in time.
Antarctica wasn’t always a desolate icescape. International researchers announced the discovery of an over 30-million-year-old lost world beneath the Antarctic ice that may have teemed with rivers, forests, and possibly even palm trees.
“This finding is like opening a time capsule,” said Professor Stewart Jamieson, a geologist from Durham University in England and co-author of the groundbreaking study, which was published in the journal “Nature Communications,” per The Economic Times.
Field work for the ice-breaking study began in 2017, when the team was drilling in a seabed to extract sediments from an ecosystem buried beneath the ice, the Jerusalem Post reported.
Upon analyzing this sediment, they happened upon an ancient ecosystem buried over a mile underneath the ice.
Researchers estimated that the total landscape, located in Wilkesland, East Antarctica, measured more than 12,000 square miles — approximately the size of Maryland, the Daily Mail reported.
“The land underneath the East Antarctic ice sheet is less well-known than the surface of Mars,” said Jamieson. “We’re investigating a small part of that landscape in more detail to see what it can tell us about the evolution of the landscape and the evolution of the ice sheet.”
Using advanced tools such as ground-penetrating radar, the team was able to pinpoint blocks of elevated ground measuring 75 and 105 miles long and up to 53 miles wide, that were separated by valleys as wide as 25 miles and plunging nearly 3,900 feet deep.
Further analysis revealed that this subglacial landmass was “likely not eroded by the ice sheet” and was likely “created by rivers,” per Jamieson.
This would mean that the prehistoric landscape likely formed before the first large-scale glaciation of Antarctica 34 million years ago.
When supercontinent Gondwana began to fragment, the shifting landmass created deep fissures and gave rise to the aforementioned towering ridges.
During this time, the region likely featured flowing rivers and dense forests in a temperate or even tropical climate — a theory supported by the team’s discovery of ancient palm pollen near the site, the Economic Times reported.
Meanwhile, the sediments found at the repository contained microorganisms, harking back to a totally different environment with warmer seas and greater biodiversity.
“It’s difficult to say exactly what this ancient landscape looked like, but depending on how far back you go, the climate might have resembled modern-day Patagonia, or even something tropical,” said Jamieson.
In other words, the greening of Antarctica is not necessarily a modern phenomeon.
As the global climate cooled, the incoming ice sheet covered the continent and halted the erosion process, effectively freezing the subglacial ecosystem in time — much like an ice block woolly mammoth.
“The geological history of Antarctica records significant fluctuations,” explained Jamieson. “But such abrupt changes gave the ice little time to significantly alter the landscape beneath.”
Despite subsequent warm spells, such as the mid-Pliocene around 3 million years ago, the regions icy carapace never receded enough to expose this subglacial topography.
The team hopes that analyzing the structure and evolution of the hidden landscape — namely how it was shaped by prehistoric ice — will help experts more accurately predict melting patterns today.
“This type of finding helps us understand how climate and geography intertwine, and what we can expect in a world with rising temperatures,” said Jamieson.