Antarctic subglacial lake inventory

This map of subglacial lakes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet shows 85 lakes newly identified in a study published in Nature in September 2025. The data for this inventory comes from ESA’s CryoSat mission, which used its radar altimetry instrument to acquire data between 2010 and 2020.

The purple shaded area around the continent’s margins is the area where CryoSat acquired data.

Red triangles denote the newly discovered active subglacial lakes, while smaller pink triangles are active subglacial lakes that had previously been detected. The grey circles are previously known stable subglacial lakes.

Glacier and Ice Stream names are abbreviated: Jutulstraumen Glacier (JG), Cook Glacier (CG), David Glacier (DG), Institute Ice Stream (IIS) and Recovery Glacier (RG).

Read full story: 85 new subglacial lakes detected below Antarctica