The secret landscape buried under the Antarctic ice sheet
18,590 views |
Mathieu Morlighem |
TEDxVienna
• October 2021
The landscape hidden under thousands of meters of ice around the South pole remains one of the least known places on Earth. It has, however, a critical impact on the stability of the ice sheet as climate warms. We show here how we accidently developed a new method to determine the shape of the bedrock by combining satellite and airborne data with simple physics: the conservation of mass. We discovered major features, such as the deepest canyon on land on Earth, that have major consequences on the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet and therefore on global sea level rise.