An international research team has identified a vast, fan-shaped geological structure hidden beneath more than three kilometres of ice in East Antarctica. Published in Nature Geoscience, the study reveals that previously separate basins—including those holding Lake Vostok and the Wilkes and Aurora basins—are in fact segments of a single, continent-spanning system, now named the East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province. The finding reframes East Antarctica not as a collection of isolated depressions but as a coherent tectonic feature shaped by a single process, altering how scientists interpret the continent’s stability and its influence on ice-sheet behaviour.

The structure likely formed through distributed rotational extension, a process in which continental crust stretches outward from a central anchor point, opening wedge-shaped basins between fault zones. Researchers link this stretching to the slow breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana, which began around 180 million years ago. The fan-shaped system may have weakened the crust enough to facilitate the eventual separation of Antarctica and Australia roughly 70 million years ago. The discovery challenges the long-held view of East Antarctica as a geologically inert craton, suggesting instead a more dynamic tectonic history that could affect how the overlying ice sheet responds to warming.

Other recent work adds detail to Antarctica’s past. A vertebra stored in a collection drawer for decades has been confirmed as the first dinosaur fossil ever found on the continent—a juvenile titanosaur that lived about 82 million years ago when temperate forests covered the land. Separately, a study in Science describes how mantle waves triggered by continental fragmentation uplifted the Gamburtsev Mountains, pushing the landscape above a critical altitude threshold and allowing the East Antarctic Ice Sheet to form 34 million years ago, even as global temperatures remained high. Meanwhile, satellite monitoring shows that iceberg A23a, which calved in 1986 and remained grounded for over three decades, has now fully disintegrated in the South Atlantic after a year of accelerated fracturing and melt.

Beyond Antarctica, a physical reconstruction of an oviraptor nest published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution suggests these bird-like dinosaurs likely relied on solar heat as much as body contact to incubate eggs, based on heat-transfer simulations using a life-sized model. In Colombia, researchers have reconstructed the 45-foot, 1.1-tonne Titanoboa, a snake that dominated Palaeocene ecosystems, using fossilised vertebrae to estimate its size and infer that equatorial temperatures 60 million years ago were about 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today. An archaeological dig in an unspecified location has also yielded a ceramic jar containing Roman coins from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, now undergoing conservation and study.

The next milestones include further geophysical surveys to refine the age and extent of the Antarctic fan-shaped basin system, and continued fossil prospecting as retreating ice exposes new rock surfaces. Researchers caution that while the basin discovery does not directly predict ice-sheet collapse, it provides a critical framework for modelling how subglacial geology influences ice flow in a warming climate.