Alpine Mountains Revealed Beneath Antarctic Ice

A series of prefabricated buildings perched on stilts create a boxy but unremarkable hamlet on the Antarctic ice. What is astonishing about this research base is that it is set 500 metres above the peaks of a 3500-metre mountain range.

The Gamburtsev mountains are not a new discovery – they were first located 50 years ago by a team of Russian scientists. But little was known about their scale and morphology. Now, an international team has returned with data revealing that if you could strip away the ice, the view would look rather like the European Alps.

The existence of this mountain range, called the Gamburtsev Mountains, shocked the Russian scientists who first discovered it more than 50 years ago, and mystery still shrouds the nearly 750-mile-long (1,200-kilometer-long) series of subglacial peaks.

At the International Polar Year conference in Oslo, Norway, scientists unveiled new radar images of an area of the mountains the size of the state of New York.

"What we'd shown before was an estimate based on gravity data — a little bit of a coarse resolution tool," said Robin Bell, a senior research scientist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. "What we showed at this meeting was the radar data. It's like going from using a big, fat Sharpie [pen] to using a fine-tipped pencil."

What the pictures reveal, Bell said, is spectacular: a dramatic landscape of rocky summits, deep river valleys, and liquid, not frozen, lakes, all hidden beneath the ice.

Bell was among a team of scientists from seven countries who spent two frigid months collecting geophysical data in the remote antipodean wilderness via sophisticated, aircraft-mounted instruments in late 2008 and early 2009.

Mountains in the Antarctic interior are few and far between. Many are a special kind of mountain called a "nunatak". The Trans Antarctic Mountains that stretch from one side of the continent to the other break through the ice cap in places to form such nunataks - they are mountains that are surrounded completely by an ice field. A sort of cold version of the ocean and islands except that these are on land and raised high above sea level.

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