Antarctica Beneath the Ice hides a continent of mountains, valleys, lakes and active water systems beneath kilometres of frozen cover.

Ice-penetrating radar, satellite gravity measurements and decades of airborne geophysical surveys have revealed a hidden continent of mountain ranges, deep basins, ancient valleys, subglacial lakes and active water systems.

Beneath East Antarctica lie the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains, a vast buried range comparable in scale to the European Alps. Elsewhere, the bed beneath Denman Glacier descends to roughly three-and-a-half kilometres below sea level, forming one of the deepest known continental points on Earth.

More than four hundred subglacial lakes have also been identified beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. The largest, Lake Vostok, lies beneath several kilometres of ice and has remained isolated from direct atmospheric contact for millions of years. Other sampled subglacial environments have shown that microbial life can survive in dark, high-pressure conditions beneath the ice.

These lakes are not necessarily isolated pools. Satellite observations have shown some of them filling and draining into one another, revealing active subglacial water networks that can move beneath the ice under immense hydraulic pressure.

Modern mapping projects such as BedMachine Antarctica Version Four and Bedmap3 have greatly improved our understanding of the buried landscape. But even these datasets still contain large regions where the bedrock surface must be inferred between direct measurement lines.

That matters because the shape of the land beneath Antarctica directly affects how the overlying ice flows, slides and melts toward the Southern Ocean.

The mystery is therefore not simply what lies beneath the ice, but how much of this hidden continent has actually been measured directly — and how much remains reconstructed from incomplete data.

EP14 begins a three-part Antarctica investigation. Part Two turns to the continent’s lost coastlines and ancient climate history, when Antarctica looked radically different from the frozen world we know today.

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