Antarctica’s buried mountain range
NOV 17, 2011
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.025713
National Geographic : The Gamburtsev Mountains may have been created 250 million years ago during the breakup of Gondwana, a supercontinent that included most of the landmasses in today’s Southern Hemisphere, as well as the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent. Fausto Ferraccioli, of the British Antarctic Survey, and colleagues, used radar to take gravitational and magnetic readings of the mountain range and found that an older, ancestral root rock lies beneath the Gamburtsevs. When Gondwana broke apart, a giant rift formed and heat from Earth’s interior warmed the root, which expanded and floated higher in the mantle, causing the mountains to uplift again. Millions of years later, the Antarctic ice sheet form and encased the entire range.
© 2011 American Institute of Physics
