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The thickest ice of Antarctica is 4,757 meters thick and, therefore, about as high as Mont Blanc. A team of international scientists under the Head of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and with the participation of the Alfred Wegener Institute discovered it when creating the most detailed map of the landscape under the Antarctic ice sheet. The map, called Bedmap3, covers more than six decades of survey data collected by airplanes, satellites, ships, and even dogsleds.

The map gives a clear view of the white continent as if its 27 million cubic km of ice have been removed, revealing the hidden locations of the tallest mountains and the deepest canyons. One notable revision to the map is the place with the thickest overlying ice. Earlier surveys put this in the Astrolabe Basin, in Adélie Land. However, data reinterpretation reveals it is in an unnamed canyon at 76.052°S, 118.378°E in Wilkes Land.

Bedmap3 is, as the name suggests, the third version of a map that gives a detailed picture of the Antarctic bedrock; work on it began in 2001, and it contains more than twice as many data points as the previous versions (82 million), averaged over a 500-meter grid.

“One of the new results is, that the Antarctic ice sheet is thicker than previously thought and has a larger volume of ice resting on the rock bed below sea level. This is particularly important at the edge of the continent, where the ice is in contact with the ocean. This increases the risk of more ice melting due to the intrusion of warmer ocean water. Bedmap3 shows us that the Antarctic is somewhat more vulnerable than we previously thought,” says Prof. Dr. Olaf Eisen, glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI).

Pritchard, H.D., Fretwell, P.T., Fremand, A.C. et al. Bedmap3 updated ice bed, surface and thickness gridded datasets for Antarctica. Scientific Data (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41597-025-04672-y

Source: Alfred-Wegener-Institute