![]() ![]() ![]() It happened during a rifting event, Bell said, when tectonic forces were wresting apart continental masses during the breakup of Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent. ![]() "They were born a long time ago, but somewhere between 100 (million) and 200 million years ago, they had a renaissance," Bell said. However, recent research indicates the mountains are a kind of geological do-over. The inexorable march of geological time erodes mountains away (if we came back in 100 million years, the Alps would be gone, Bell said) and the Gamburtsevs, at the ripe old age of 900 million to a billion years old, should have been worn down eons ago. Yet, she added, the truly mysterious part of the hidden mountains is not that they exist, but how they still exist. It doesn't matter which way you spin - it's pretty flat," said Bell, who has studied the area for years. "It's really hard to imagine that there are mountains under there. The team had stumbled upon what were later dubbed the Gamburtsev Mountains, a range of steep peaks that rise to 9,000 feet (3,000 meters) and stretch 750 miles (1,200 km) across the interior of the continent. "They suddenly found this very thin ice in the middle of the ice sheet, and they said, 'Hey, there are mountains here,'" Bell told OurAmazingPlanet.īig mountains. In the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the team was traveling across ice 2 miles (3 km) thick, when something strange started to happen, according to Robin Bell, a geophysicist and professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. (Image credit: Michael Studinger.)Īnd it was beneath the ice that scientists made one of Antarctica's most screenplay-worthy discoveries: a sweeping kingdom of rocky slopes and liquid lakes, secreted under the ice for millennia.ĭuring a 1958 mapping expedition, a Soviet team was trekking from the coast across the interior of the eastern half of the continent, and detonating explosives every hundred miles to measure the thickness of the ice. Airborne imaging technology allowed scientists to see the rugged topography of the Gamburtsev Mountains, hidden entirely beneath the ice sheet. ![]()
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