Greenland's Bedrock Valleys, Now Mapped More Sharply Than Before

Below the Greenland Ice Sheet lies a landscape no human eye has directly seen. NASA's Earth Observatory reports that a newly developed method for mapping that hidden bedrock has produced the most detailed and accurate view of it yet, revealing an expansive network of valleys carved into the surface beneath the ice. The value of a map like this is that it turns a blank in the human record into terrain: a surface with shape and direction, inferred rather than visited. The ice sheet is what people look at; the valleys are what sits underneath it.