Giant Fan-Shaped Structure Buried Beneath Antarctica’s Thickest Ice Stuns Scientists

A huge hidden structure has been identified beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, buried under ice that is more than three kilometres thick in some places. The discovery does not describe a building or an artificial object, but a vast geological network of basins that scientists had not previously recognised as one connected system.

The research, sourced from Durham University and published in Nature Geoscience, names the feature the East Antarctic Fan-shaped Basin Province. It links several famous buried landscapes, including the Wilkes and Aurora basins and the basin containing Lake Vostok, the largest known subglacial lake on Earth.