The British Antarctic Service (BAS) has prepared the most detailed map of how the Antarctica without ice looked like.
According to BAS, as part of a study conducted with the participation of international researchers, data obtained within 60 years through aerial photography, satellite shots, as well as observations from ships and ships and thanks to dog sledges were summarized.
The card allows you to see the White Continent as if 27 million cubic kilometers of ice were removed from it, exposing high mountain peaks and deep canyons hidden under the icy cover. The card, called “Bedmap3” also showed that, contrary to previously emergency belief in the Astrolabi basin on the ground, there is no upper ice layer 4700 meters thick. The thickest upper layer of ice has an nameless canyon on Wilks’s ground. Its thickness is 4757 meters.
Bedmap3 – the third and most complete map created since 2001. It contains more than twice as many data points compared to previous versions (82 million).
According to these data, the total volume of antarctic ice is 27.1 million square meters. km., And the area of glaciers is 13.6 million square meters. km. It is estimated that if all the ice is on the continent, where the average ice thickness is about 2 km, it melts, then the level of the ocean will rise by 58 meters.
Peter Fretwell, one of the researchers who created the card, said that the Antarctica is more vulnerable than it was believed earlier.
