If you could somehow snap your fingers and peel back the two-mile-thick slab of ice covering Greenland today, you wouldn’t just find a bigger version of Iceland. Honestly, you'd find a bowl. A massive, jagged, semi-submerged basin that looks more like a flooded mountain range than a solid continent.
It’s weird to think about.
We see that giant white wedge on Google Maps and assume there’s a solid chunk of rock shaped exactly like that sitting underneath. But the weight of the Greenland Ice Sheet—roughly 2.9 million cubic kilometers of frozen water—is so incredibly heavy that it has literally pushed the Earth’s crust down into the mantle. Geologists call this isostatic depression. Basically, the island is sagging under its own weight.
When you look at a Greenland map without ice, you aren't just looking at geography. You’re looking at a 1.7-million-square-kilometer crime scene where physics has spent the last few million years warping the ground.
The Grand Canyon You Didn't Know Existed
Back in 2013, researchers from the University of Bristol, using decades of airborne radar data from NASA’s Operation IceBridge, stumbled upon something staggering. They found a canyon. But not just any canyon.
This thing is at least 750 kilometers long. That makes it significantly longer than the Grand Canyon in Arizona. It snakes from the center of the island all the way to the northern coast at the Petermann Glacier fjord. If the ice vanished tomorrow, this "mega-canyon" would be the defining feature of the North. It’s deep, too—about 800 meters in some spots.
Scientists think it was carved by an ancient river system before the ice took over about 4 million years ago. Imagine a river that big. It would have been a massive artery for the island's drainage. Today, it just sits there in the dark, acting as a subglacial highway for meltwater to sneak out to the Atlantic.
👉 See also: Casey Ramirez: The Small Town Benefactor Who Smuggled 400 Pounds of Cocaine
Is Greenland Actually an Archipelago?
This is where it gets kinda controversial among geographers. If the ice melted right this second, a Greenland map without ice would reveal that the island might not even be one single island.
Because the center of the landmass is pushed so far below sea level, a huge chunk of the interior would immediately be underwater. You’d have a ring of high, jagged mountains along the coast—looking like a crown—and a massive inland sea in the middle.
- The eastern and western mountain ranges would remain high and dry.
- The central basin, currently resting hundreds of meters below sea level, would flood.
- Greenland would effectively become an archipelago of several large islands joined by a shallow interior sea.
However, there’s a catch.
Earth is elastic. Sorta.
Once that ice weight is gone, the land starts to "rebound." It’s called post-glacial rebound. Without those billions of tons of pressure, the crust would slowly—we’re talking millimeters per year—start to pop back up. Over thousands of years, the central basin would rise above sea level, eventually stitching the islands back into a single landmass. So, is it one island or many? It depends on which century you’re asking.
The BedMachine Project and Modern Data
We don’t have to guess what the floor looks like anymore. For a long time, our maps of the bedrock were blurry. We used "gravity anomalies" and sparse radar pings. But then came BedMachine Greenland.
✨ Don't miss: Lake Nyos Cameroon 1986: What Really Happened During the Silent Killer’s Release
This project, led by Mathieu Morlighem at UC Irvine, changed everything. They used a "mass conservation" approach. Instead of just pinging the bottom with radar, they looked at how fast the ice was moving on the surface. By calculating the volume of ice flowing through a certain width, they could work out exactly how deep the "pipe" (the valley) had to be.
The results were a bit terrifying for climate scientists.
They found that many of the glacial valleys are much deeper than we thought. Why does that matter? It means the "grounding lines"—the places where the ice meets the rock—are deeper underwater. This allows warm ocean water to creep further inland under the ice, melting it from the bottom up.
What the Soil (or Lack Thereof) Tells Us
If you’re picturing a lush green paradise once the ice is gone, you might want to temper those expectations.
The ice has been grinding across that rock like industrial-grade sandpaper for millions of years. It has scoured the landscape clean. In most places, there is no "soil." There’s just polished bedrock, pulverized rock flour, and boulders the size of houses.
- Northern Greenland: Likely a polar desert. Cold, dry, and rocky.
- Southern Greenland: Potential for tundra and eventually taiga forest, but it would take centuries for organic matter to build up enough to support a real ecosystem.
- The Interior: A massive, salty mudflat or inland sea until the rebound completes.
The Fossil Record Under the Frost
We actually have proof of what Greenland looked like "naked." In 1966, US Army scientists at Camp Century drilled a core nearly a mile deep. They weren't looking for fossils; they were doing Cold War stuff (Project Iceworm). They hit dirt at the bottom, tossed it in a freezer, and forgot about it for decades.
🔗 Read more: Why Fox Has a Problem: The Identity Crisis at the Top of Cable News
When researchers like Andrew Christ from the University of Vermont finally looked at that dirt in 2019, they found twigs, moss, and leaves.
This wasn't from millions of years ago. It was from within the last million years. This tells us that Greenland has been ice-free relatively recently in geologic time. It was a green, vegetated landscape. It didn't have two miles of ice. It had life.
Why This Research Is Hard
Mapping a continent under ice is like trying to map the bottom of the ocean, but the water is solid and moves.
Radar doesn't always work. If there is water at the base of the ice, it scatters the signal. If the ice is too salty or too warm, the signal dies. That’s why the Greenland map without ice is a living document. Every year, as NASA’s ICESat-2 and various European Space Agency missions orbit the poles, the resolution gets better. We are seeing the skeleton of a continent in higher and higher definition.
Actionable Insights for the Curious
If you’re looking to explore this data yourself or understand the implications, here is what you need to do:
- Check the BedMachine datasets: If you’re a data nerd, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) hosts the BedMachine v4 maps. It’s the gold standard.
- Differentiate between Topography and Bathymetry: When looking at these maps, make sure you know if the sea level has been "corrected." A map showing Greenland without ice today looks very different from one showing Greenland after isostatic rebound.
- Monitor the Grounding Lines: Keep an eye on news regarding the Jakobshavn or Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden (79N) glaciers. These are the "drainage pipes" of the island, and their bedrock depth determines how fast the ice sheet will collapse.
- Use Visualization Tools: NASA’s "Eyes on the Earth" app often features updated topography models that allow you to toggle ice layers on and off.
The reality of Greenland is that it’s a hidden continent. We’re the first generation of humans to ever see its true shape, even if it’s only through the "eyes" of satellites and math. It’s not a flat plateau. It’s a complex, broken, beautiful mess of canyons and basins that has been hidden for a very long time.