Scientists discover hidden landscape bigger than Belgium 'frozen in time' under ice for millions of years

Scientists have discovered a landscape which has been concealed from the wider world for millions of years.

And no, before you ask no, this is not actually an account of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, with long extinct animals still roaming some long forgotten world beneath our feet.

As compelling as that would be, this is nonetheless a very exciting discovery about a particular part of Antarctica.

It's a landscape of hills and valleys carved out by ancient rivers, and which has remained buried beneath layers of ice potentially for more than 34 million years.

It's possible that in all that time this landscape has been frozen in place, unexposed to the wider world.

One thing is certain though, it's been frozen far too long for any human to have ever seen it.

Glaciologist Stewart Jamieson told AFP: "It is an undiscovered landscape — no one's laid eyes on it."

He added: "What is exciting is that it's been hiding there in plain sight."

Nature Communications

This is because the scientists didn't use any new data to find the landscape, instead they just took a different approach to the data they had.

The best way to see the landscape is to fly a plane overhead and send radio waves into the landscape before analysing the echoes, a technique called radio echo sounding.

But this is often impractical due to the sheer size of Antarctica, so researchers turned to previously captured satellite images, and were amazingly able to 'trace out' the 'ghost image' of the valleys and ridges below the ice.

When they compared this with the radio echo data, the lost landscape emerged.

At present, they don't know exactly how long the land has been under the ice, but think it has been at least 14 million years, and could well be much longer.

The area covers some 32,000 square kilometres, or around 12,000 square miles, making it roughly the size of Belgium.

At one point in the past it was home to trees, plants, and possibly even animals before the ice came along, rendering it 'frozen in time'.

Alessandro Dahan/Getty Images

Unfortunately, the newly-discovered landscape is under threat from human-driven climate change.

While the potential for the landscape to be exposed is a 'long way off' since it's currently buried under hundreds of kilometers of ice, Jamieson warned it was unclear what could cause a 'runaway reaction' that would cause the ice to melt.

This is not the only discovery around the South Pole in recent years. A 2022 expedition into the Weddell Sea around Antarctica with a research team led by Greenpeace revealed an extraordinary community of animals.

There was huge richness of biodiversity, including corals and sponges living deep down in the ocean. Scientists even compared the reefs to tropical coral reefs in their biodiversity.

Certainly not what you'd expect diving around the South Pole.

It all just goes to show how little we understand about the world, despite the huge advances we have made.