Complex mesoscale landscapes beneath Antarctica mapped from space

The landscape shrouded by the Antarctic Ice Sheet provides important insights into its history and influences the ice response to climate forcing. However, knowledge of this critical boundary has depended on interpolation between irregularly distributed geophysical surveys, creating major spatial biases in maps of Antarctica’s subglacial landscape. As stress changes associated with ice flow over bedrock obstacles produce ice surface topography, recently acquired, high-resolution satellite maps of the ice surface offer a transformative basis for mapping subglacial landforms. We present a continental-scale elevation map of Antarctica’s subglacial topography produced by applying the physics of ice flow to ice surface maps and incorporating geophysical ice thickness observations. Our results enrich understanding of mesoscale (2 to 30 kilometers) subglacial landforms and unmask the spatial distribution of subglacial roughness and geomorphology.