14 DAY TRIAL // When asked to picture Antarctica, most people (if not all) find themselves picturing a really big ice sheet. The world's biggest ice sheet, to be more precise.
The video above, pieced together by the British Antarctic Survey and released by NASA, reminds us that there's more to this continent than meets the eye.
The footage introduces us to an Antarctica entirely stripped of its ice coverage. What we get to gaze upon is one very detailed map of its underlying bedrock.
Specialists explain that creating this map of a de-iced Antarctica was necessary in order to better understand how climate change and global warming affect these frozen lands.
“In order to accurately simulate the dynamic response of ice sheets to changing environmental conditions, such as temperature and snow accumulation, we need to know the shape and structure of the bedrock below the ice sheets in great detail,” reads a statement issued by scientist Michael Studinger.