The eastern section of Antarctica is buried beneath a thick ice sheet. Some scientists simply assumed that under that cold mass there was nothing more than a “frozen tectonic block,” a somewhat homogeneous mass that distinguished it from the mixed up geologies of other continents.

But with the help of data from a d iscontinued European satellite, scientists have now found that East Antarctica is in fact a graveyard of continental remnants. They have created stunning 3-D maps of the southernmost continent’s tectonic underworld and found that the ice has been concealing wreckage of an ancient supercontinent’s spectacular destruction.

The researchers, led by Jörg Ebbing, a geophysicist at Kiel University in Germany, reported their discovery earlier this month in Scientific Reports.

The findings relied on data from the Gravity Field and Steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) satellite, which orbited Earth just 155 miles above the surface until late 2013, when it re-entered the atmosphere at the end of its mission. Called the “Ferrari of space,” this sleek instrument could measure the gravitational fields weaving through Earth’s crust and mantle.