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An autonomous underwater vehicle mapped an unexpectedly rugged landscape beneath West Antarctica’s Dotson Ice Shelf: terraces, channels, fractures and teardrop-shaped depressions carved into the ice. The “strange shapes” were not objects or signs of anything artificial. They are features of the ice’s underside, revealed by sonar and interpreted as evidence of varied melting and ocean flow.
The discovery came from a 2022 survey and was published in Science Advances on July 31, 2024—not from a new 2026 expedition. The peer-reviewed study matters because it offers a rare, detailed view of how seawater reshapes an ice shelf from below.
A sculpted landscape beneath a floating ice shelf
From above, a vast Antarctic ice shelf can look like a broad, nearly featureless sheet. Its submerged underside tells a different story. Multibeam sonar maps made by the vehicle Ran show a varied surface beneath Dotson Ice Shelf, including broad terraces, ridges and valleys, channel-like forms, smoother eroded patches, fractures, and distinctive teardrop-shaped indentations.
These are patterns in the ice itself—not separate formations sitting beneath it. Sonar measures distance from the vehicle to the overhead surface using returning sound pulses. Any colorful three-dimensional image of the terrain is therefore a reconstruction of acoustic measurements, not ordinary camera footage of the underside.
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The researchers describe the work as unusually extensive, high-resolution direct mapping of an ice-shelf base. It does not mean that no one had previously observed an ice-shelf underside: scientists have also studied these environments using satellite data, boreholes and ocean measurements, among other methods.
Where the survey happened
Dotson is a floating ice shelf in West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea sector. It is connected to the Antarctic ice sheet and fed by glacial ice, but it is not the same place as Thwaites Glacier, sometimes called the “Doomsday Glacier.” The wider research effort has links to studies of Thwaites, but the paper about these mapped shapes focuses on Dotson.
An ice shelf floats over the ocean; a grounded glacier rests on bedrock. That difference becomes important when considering why melting beneath a shelf can matter for future sea levels.
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Ran was a research-grade autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, operated by the University of Gothenburg. It was not a remotely piloted vehicle in continuous contact with an operator. Researchers programmed its route and instruments, and it navigated independently beneath the ice using onboard systems. The vehicle was a Kongsberg HUGIN-class AUV rated to 3,000 meters, according to the study.
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Under a floating ice shelf, GPS and ordinary radio communication are unavailable. An AUV must navigate without those direct links, relying on onboard navigation, sonar and acoustic positioning. Ran travelled about 50 meters below the ice while its multibeam sonar mapped the overhead surface.
During the survey, the vehicle spent 27 days in the water and travelled more than 1,000 kilometers. It reached about 17 kilometers beneath the shelf from its seaward edge; ice above parts of the surveyed cavity was roughly 350 meters thick. These figures describe the mission and mapped area, not every part of Dotson.
What could have carved the shapes?
The central finding is that melting is not uniform. Water moving beneath the shelf can interact with the ice in different ways from place to place, leaving a complex pattern rather than a smooth, evenly eroded surface.
- Quiet or slower-melting areas: The study links some broad terraces to relatively slow melting.
- Turbulent flow: Shear and turbulence can increase erosion and leave smoother areas or more strongly sculpted terrain.
- Warm water and convection: Intrusions and circulation can redistribute heat and intensify melting in particular locations.
- Fractures and channels: Cracks expose additional ice surfaces to seawater and can affect the pathways through which water moves.
- Rotating flow: The researchers interpret the teardrop-shaped depressions as consistent with rotating flow in the ocean boundary layer beneath the ice. This is an interpretation of the mapped forms, not a direct observation of them being created.
No single mechanism explains every feature. The sonar records shape and distance, but by itself it cannot establish the age of each formation, the exact water flow that made it, or whether every feature formed under the same conditions. The paper offers physical explanations while leaving room for uncertainty.
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Melting varies across Dotson
The study reports large regional differences, so one melt-rate figure should not be treated as representative of the entire shelf. Some central and eastern areas have ice roughly 300–400 meters thick and basal melt rates around 1 meter per year. In parts of the west, the ice is thinner—about 250 meters—and mean basal melt rates in some channel-like regions are roughly 15 meters per year.
Those estimates refer to different areas and conditions. They do not show that all of Dotson, or Antarctica as a whole, is melting at 15 meters per year. The significance is the contrast: substantial variation can occur beneath one shelf, in a pattern that a single average may obscure.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why a better map matters for climate science
Satellites can measure changes at the surface and help scientists track ice loss, but they cannot resolve every detail of the submerged base. Direct mapping reveals the geometry of the ice-water boundary and helps researchers test how well models represent currents, turbulence and basal melting. A more accurate account of those processes can improve projections of how ice shelves change.
The sea-level connection is indirect. Because a floating ice shelf already displaces seawater, melting the shelf does not raise sea level one-for-one in the same way that adding newly melted land ice does. But shelves can buttress—restrain—the grounded glaciers that feed them. If thinning weakens that restraint, grounded ice can flow faster into the ocean, contributing to sea-level rise. The Dotson study improves understanding of a process relevant to that chain; it does not provide a new standalone sea-level forecast or prove a continent-wide acceleration in melting.
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Ran was lost on a later mission
The survey data came from an expedition in 2022. In January 2024, Ran disappeared beneath Antarctic ice during an attempt to repeat surveys and was not recovered, according to the University of Gothenburg. Its loss underscores the risks of operating a vehicle in a dark, GPS-denied environment under moving ice, where recovery can be difficult or impossible.
The University of Gothenburg has said a replacement, Ran II, is expected to be delivered in winter 2026–2027. That is a stated plan, not confirmation that the vehicle has already been deployed.
What remains to be learned
A detailed map is a snapshot, not a time series. Repeat surveys could show how quickly individual terraces, channels and depressions evolve, and whether similar patterns occur beneath other Antarctic shelves. Researchers also need to determine how well ocean models reproduce the observed terrain and how local melting connects with broader circulation in the Amundsen Sea.
For now, the striking result is not that scientists found something inexplicable beneath Antarctica. It is that the underside of Dotson Ice Shelf is far more intricately sculpted than a simple, smooth boundary would suggest—and that mapping those details can help reveal how ocean water acts on the ice.
Sources: Peer-reviewed study in Science Advances; British Antarctic Survey mission summary; University of Gothenburg profile of Ran.
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