Overview
- The international team published their peer-reviewed paper in Nature Geoscience on June 3, 2026, formally naming the East Antarctic Fan-shaped Basin Province.
- The province joins the Wilkes Basin, the Aurora Basin and the basin that contains Lake Vostok into a single fan-shaped system that lies under more than three kilometres of ice in places.
- Researchers reached the result by integrating subglacial topography with gravity, magnetic and seismic data plus crust and lithosphere models and rebounded topography calculations.
- The authors interpret the fan pattern as the product of distributed rotational extension tied to deep-time tectonic events, and they say it may be one of the largest examples of such crustal stretching on Earth.
- The bedrock shape steers ice flow and subglacial lakes now, which could influence the stability of parts of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and affect future sea-level risk pending further modelling and observations.