Greenland is capped with a vast ice sheet that spans 1.7 million square kilometers (656,000 square miles) and measures more than 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) at its thickest point. Below all this ice lies a landscape human eyes have never seen directly. But a newly developed method for mapping this hidden bedrock has produced the most detailed and accurate view of it yet.
The new map reveals an expansive network of valleys carved into the surface beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. Many of the features formed well before most of the ice above them existed, offering new context for the island’s geologic history—and potentially helping scientists refine projections of the ice sheet’s future. Scientists described the newly mapped valleys in a NASA-led paper published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The map, shown above, was derived from a method called Ice Flow Perturbation Analysis. As ice flows over a valley or ridge, the topography leaves a faint signature on the ice surface. Satellites map the ice surface in fine detail, and scientists can use these subtle bumps and dips to infer the shape of the landscape buried below. The work aims to improve future versions of BedMachine Greenland, a high-resolution dataset of the terrain beneath the ice sheet.
Using the technique, researchers manually mapped 1,943 subglacial valleys beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet, about a third of which are newly identified. About half of the valleys included in BedMachine Greenland, primarily near the ice sheet’s edge, are now known to extend farther inland than that map indicates, in some cases by hundreds of kilometers.
Some aspects of the new map align with the current understanding of how Greenland’s landscapes formed. For instance, many of the valleys appear to begin in the southern and eastern highlands, where the ice sheet is thought to have first formed. Near the eastern highlands, the map reveals a mountain range beneath the ice, with interconnected valleys and relief that increases toward the coast. These alpine-style landforms may have survived under the ice since at least the Pliocene.
Other aspects of the topography are more puzzling. The analysis indicates numerous valleys, especially in the west-central region, that are long, straight, and consistently aligned in a southwest-northeast direction. This orientation suggests a tectonic influence, generating preferential pathways along which water could flow and valleys could form. “That’s a riddle to us,” said Joe MacGregor, a NASA cryospheric scientist and co-author of the study. “Greenland is justifiably usually treated as a rigid block of old rock that is simply translated as needed to accommodate the motion and interactions of other tectonic plates.”
Separately, the angles at which the valleys branch offer another insight into their origin. Their relatively wide branching angles suggest that surface water didn’t act alone; instead, a widespread groundwater network—seeping upward and eroding the surrounding rock—likely helped carve the valleys before the ice sheet formed.
Mapping these valleys matters for understanding the ice sheet, which has continued to dramatically reshape the landscape. Ice flow concentrates in valleys, where it forms glaciers that eventually calve into fjords at the periphery of the ice sheet. This creates a reinforcing cycle: ice funneling through a valley gets thicker, thicker ice flows faster, and faster flow carves the valley even deeper.
This carving power is especially evident along western Greenland. MacGregor likened it to the glacially incised landscape at Yosemite, with Greenland’s western coast resembling, as he put it, “El Capitan after El Capitan.”
Studying the valleys also matters for the ice sheet’s future. Because the relationship between ice flow and valleys is well understood, scientists expect that as the ice sheet retreats, flow will continue to concentrate wherever the valleys already are. “The better we understand the topography now,” MacGregor said, “the better sense we’ll have of what it will look like in the longer term—beyond the next decade or two—as faster ice flow propagates into Greenland’s interior.”
NASA Earth Observatory map by Lauren Dauphin using data from Chartrand et al. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
