A Scottish scientist has discovered a one mile deep rift valley the size of the Grand Canyon beneath the ice in West Antarctica.

Click the television icon above to watch video from an ice-penetrating radar survey.

Dr Robert Bingham, a glaciologist at Aberdeen University, made the remarkable find using radar equipment fitted to a snowmobile during fieldwork with the British Antarctic Survey two and a half years ago.

But it has taken up until now for all the data to be assessed and for the scale of the discovery to be quantified.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is of great scientific interest as it is losing ice faster than any other part of Antarctica with some glaciers shrinking by more than one metre per year. So it is important to improve predictions of its future behaviour in a warming world.

It is believed the huge gorge is contributing to ice loss from this part of the continent, and to the rise in global rise in sea levels.

Experts from the University of Aberdeen and British Antarctic Survey (BAS) made the discovery below Ferrigno Ice Stream, a region visited only once previously, over fifty years ago, in 1961, and one that is remote even by Antarctic standards.

Their findings, reported in Nature this week, reveal that the ice-filled ancient rift basin is connected to the warming ocean influencing ice flow and loss.

Dr Bingham, based at the university’s School of Geosciences and lead author of the study, discovered the rift while conducting fieldwork with the British Antarctic Survey in 2009/ 2010.

He was accompanied by a mountain guide Chris Griffiths as an Antarctic adviser.

They towed ice-penetrating radar towed behind a skidoo for nine weeks across 1500 miles of ice, the distance from London to Athens.

Dr Bingham, whose fieldwork was funded by the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) said: “Over the last 20 years we have used satellites to monitor ice losses from Antarctica, and we have witnessed consistent and substantial ice losses from around much of its coastline.

"For some of the glaciers, including Ferrigno Ice Stream, the losses are especially pronounced, and, to understand why, we needed to acquire data about conditions beneath the ice surface."

Click here to watch Dr Bingham's animated film about ice thinning in Antarctica

He said he was surprised by what they found, adding: "We were driving across this relatively flat ice, and each night we would return to our tent and look at the data and it was after one of the first traverses we looked at the data and could see the depth below the ice just dropping way.

"What we found is that lying beneath the ice there is a large valley, parts of which are approximately a mile deeper than the surrounding landscape.

"If you stripped away all of the ice here today, you’d see a feature every bit as dramatic as the huge rift valleys you see in Africa and in size as significant as the Grand Canyon.

"This is at odds with the flat ice surface that we were driving across - without these measurements we would never have known that it was there.

"What’s particularly important is that this spectacular valley aligns perfectly with the recordings of ice-surface lowering and ice loss that we have witnessed with satellite observations over this area for the last twenty years."

It had taken the last two years to calibrate the data to ensure the analysis was correct.

He said that despite discovering the valley, he would not be seeking to have it called after him. "That would be bad form".

Professor David Vaughan, from British Antarctic Survey, said: "Thinning ice in West Antarctica is currently contributing nearly 10 % of global sea level rise. It’s important to understand this hot spot of change so we can make more accurate predictions for future sea level rise."