Beneath Antarctica's Ice, Intriguing Evidence of Lost Continents

[Judi Lynn]

By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor | November 13, 2018 10:54am ET

A new map reveals the remnants of ancient continents lurking beneath Antarctica's ice.

The map shows that East Antarctica is made up of multiple cratons, which are the cores of continents that came before, according to study leader Jörg Ebbing, a geoscientist at Kiel University in Germany.

"This observation leads back to the break-up of the supercontinent Gondwana and the link of Antarctica to the surrounding continents," Ebbing told Live Science. The findings help reveal fundamental facts about Earth's tectonics and how Antarctica's land and ice sheets interact, he wrote in an email. [Antarctica: The Ice-Covered Bottom of the World (Photos)]

Because the continent is so remote and buried in ice, Antarctica is a bit of a blank spot on the geologic map, Ebbing said. The researchers used data from the European Space Agency's Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) satellite to fill in the blanks. GOCE orbited Earth from 2009 to 2013, gathering data on the planet's gravity field. Gravity's pull differs very slightly from one point on Earth to another, depending on changes in topography and the density of the planet's interior.

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