Sascha is a U.K.-based trainee staff writer at Live Science. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Southampton in England and a master’s degree in science communication from Imperial College London. Her work has appeared in The Guardian and the health website Zoe.
Beneath East Antarctica's undulating ice sheet lies an ancient, river-carved landscape that provides a perfect snapshot of the region before glaciers covered the continent, a new study finds.
"We could see that there was something like the ghost of the landscape under the ice," study co-lead author Stewart 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 rivers flowing over it, which automatically must mean that it's from before the ice sheet grew."
When the climate cooled following the Cretaceous, ice caps may have formed on top of each block and carved out valleys as the ice melted and water trickled down from the peaks."Those rivers were probably flowing towards the coast, which is a few hundred kilometers away, at a time when that coast was opening up," Jamieson said.
In the newly discovered location, the ice didn't grow thick enough to create a layer of water, Jamieson said."When you look at the 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 it's going really slowly, and that's because it's basically frozen to its bed," he said.
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