If you had to, how would you remove 6.5 million cubic miles of ice from Antarctica? In truth, you have two options: On one hand, you could dramatically accelerate the warming of the world to turn Earth’s southernmost continent into a parched realm. On the other, you could spend several decades zipping across it with planes, Ski-Doos, and people armed with some extremely cool pieces of technology. Fortunately, when a group of scientists set out to answer this question, they chose the second option—in part to understand what might happen in the event that climate change leads to the first one.
In March, an international team of scientists led by the British Antarctic Survey published the highest-resolution map of the geologic underworld of Antarctica…