A new map shows the hidden landscape beneath Antarctica’s thick ice in unprecedented detail. Researchers combined satellite data and the physics of glacier movement to reveal thousands of previously unknown hills and ridges. These detailed maps shed fresh light on Antarctica’s underground mountains and valleys. "It's like before you had a grainy pixel film camera, and now you've got a properly zoomed-in digital image of what's really going on," said lead author Dr Helen Ockenden from the University of Grenoble-Alpes. Satellites have long tracked Antarctica’s icy surface, but what lies underneath remained unclear. More is known about some planets than Antarctica’s bedrock beneath up to three miles of ice. Prof Robert Bingham from the University of Edinburgh, co-author of the study, said, "I'm just so excited to look at that and just see the whole bed of Antarctica at once. I think that's amazing." Past radar surveys only covered scattered tracks tens of kilometers apart, leaving gaps. Bingham explained, "If you imagined the Scottish Highlands or the European Alps covered by ice, and the only way to see their shape was occasional flights, you'd miss many sharp mountains and valleys." The new method combined satellite ice surface data and glacier flow patterns to fill the gaps. Ockenden compared the technique to spotting rocks in a river by looking at water movement. Their results uncovered tens of thousands of new landforms and clearer details of known mountain ranges. An exciting find is a deep 400 km-long channel in the Maud Subglacial Basin, about 50 m deep and 6 km wide. While the map may still have uncertainties, experts say it is a big step forward. Dr Peter Fretwell from the British Antarctic Survey stated, "It gives us an opportunity to fill in the gaps between surveys." Understanding the underground terrain will improve models predicting how glaciers move and melt with climate change. This is crucial because Antarctica’s melting speed is a major unknown in climate science. Fretwell added, "This study gives us a better picture of what's going to happen in the future and how quickly ice in Antarctica will contribute to global sea-level rise." The study is published in the journal Science.