New findings show Antarctica’s landscape was made by running rivers, not tons of glaciers

A new surprising finding has popped up related to Antarctica and its mountainous landscape. A team of Scottish scientists recently made an extraordinary discovery that Antarctica landscape was not formed by carved of glaciers or billions of tons of icy glaciers that was previously considered. The scientists have claimed that the present icy landscape was formed by running rivers during the period before the entire continent was covered under ice.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh working jointly with Durham University’s researchers revealed that the South Pole continent’s mountains and valleys, majorly buried under ice up to 4 km thick, were formed millions of years ago, after the landscape of Antarctica got detached from that of Australia, Africa and India. They claim that before the separation, it was inundated by an ice sheet.

The newly founded facts of how the landscape of Antarctica evolved might have implications for the ongoing research on climate change and how the ice sheet responds to continuous global warming. The landscape underneath the Antarctic ice sheet was studied and compared to the landscapes of the southern continents to get an idea of how Antarctica’s landscape would have looked before it was buried under ice.

According to Phy.org, the researchers’ study shows West Antarctica shares a similar landscape and also earlier evolved in a similar way to other regions including Madagascar, Africa and Australia. To back the descriptions, they further added that the characteristics of such as river valleys, plains, mountain escarpments and basins are the same.

“It is remarkable to stand on the slopes of a mountain in South Africa and realize that their exact equivalents lie preserved in ice in Antarctica,” David Sugden, a professor from the University of Edinburgh's School of Geosciences opined.

Antarctica was formed from the splitting of ancient supercontinent, Gondwana (aka Gondwanaland – a supercontinent that existed from the Neoproterozoic until the Carboniferous). The process of shaping the lands of the southern hemisphere commenced around 160 to 180 million years ago whereas the formation of the ice sheet on Antarctica started later around 34 million years ago.