Video: Peeling Back the Ice of Antarctica

link

Warning, this video contains full frontal continental nudity, which is actually pretty awesome.

The video is short but shows a cobbled together map of the land under the ice of the antarctic.
This survey is more accurate than one they did some years ago and shows a lot of the mountainous terrain of antarctica.

Bedmap2 was created by the British Antarctic Survey, and used decades of data to produce this detailed view of the frozen continent. NASA’s contribution to the dataset includes surface measurements from its now-retired orbiting Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), and results from several years of flyovers by specialized aircraft that collected radar and other data measuring changes in the thickness of sea ice, glaciers, and ice sheets as part of Operation IceBridge.

The work improves on the decade-old Bedmap project, which virtually thawed the continent, but at lower resolution. Both maps combine information on ice thickness, bedrock topography, and surface elevation. Bedmap2 added millions of extra data points and also covers a wider swath of land than its predecessor. Over on NASA’s site, you can compare the two datasets by sliding between them.

reply to post by grey580

Nice. And that's a pretty tall mountain range running up the middle of the continent. Climbing some of those peaks could be a climber's dream vacation.

But, but.... where's the giant hole in the middle of it?!?




Cool vid!

reply to post by iamhobo


Clearly Admiral Byrd worked with the inner earth nazis to finish the cover to keep their secret.

It would be interesting to compare these results with the ice-free Antarctica Piri Reis map of the 16th century and other older maps of ice-free land mass of Antarctica.

Here is a pic I got from google image search, for those of us with crap internet speeds.
It's a great image, the landscape sure looks tortured.


Bugger, I thought the pic would come out bigger than that lol
Oh well, here is the link to the full image.
www.nasa.gov...