The Gamburtsev Mountains are over 750 mi long and well-nigh 9,000 feet tall , making them roughly the same size as the Alps . But nobody has ever even seen these wad , because they ’re located late beneath the Antarctic ice sheet .
First come upon in 1958 , the Gamburtsev Mountains might literally be the large whodunit on the planet . How could a mountain range of such immense size of it be inter so far beneath anywhere between 2000 substructure and a Roman mile of snow and ice ? It ’s not an well-heeled doubt to answer – as Columbia geophysicist Robin Bell points out , we have plenty of rock samples from the Moon and other far removed objects , and yet none from an Alps - sized peck range on our own planet .
As such , scientist have to trust on more indirect method acting to piece together the range ’s origins . An international team used a mix of deoxyephedrine - penetrate radar , gravity metre , and gaussmeter to peer through the sparkler and calculate out the exact contours of the peaks and vale that make up the Gamburtsevs . From this information , they ’ve been able-bodied to piece together a likely account of Earth ’s only literally unclimbable quite a little .
According to their research , the mountains first formed a billion class ago during a massive collisions of continent . This causes the tilt that make up the Gamburtsev Mountains to crush together , but more significantly they created a slurred root deeply in the crust below the mountain range . Over the result hundreds of jillion of years , these first Gamburtsevs were erode away , leave only the crustal root .
It was from that antecedent that the new Gamburtsevs would imprint somewhere between 250 and 100 million old age ago , as the southern supercontinent Gondwanaland broke part . This process warmed up the rootage , and this in good turn pushed land back upwardly , full of rivers and glacier that over time carved a salient mountain range . The East Antarctic Ice Sheet formed about 34 million year ago and completely covered the Gamburtsevs , protecting from further eating away but get out them wholly hidden from the rest period of the public .
Robin Bell explains this remarkable process :
“ It has been almost a billion year since the Gamburtsev first form . This work show that very sure-enough mountain can rise again , like a Phoenix from the ash . The Gamburtsevs rose from the long eroded East Antarctic craton . We are accustomed to thinking that mess construction associate to a undivided architectonic event , rather than sequences of events . The lesson we learned about multiple effect forming the Gamburtsevs may inform studies of the history of other mountain belts . ”
The squad next hopes to drill down to the mountains to retrieve the first actual samples from the mountains . From there , well … perhaps I spoke too presently when I declared these mountains unclimbable . If nothing else , an expedition down there would make for one hell of a moving picture , even if it ’s not possible to actually do it here in world .
ViaNature . Top image of above - basis Antarctic pot by eliduke onFlickr . Second image by Zina Deretsky / NSF .
AntarcticaGeologyMountainPlate tectonicsScience
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