19 Nov 2011

Gamburtsev mountain range data revealed

8:30 am on 19 November 2011

Scientists say they can now explain the existence of extraordinary mountains buried beneath the Antarctic ice.

The Gamburtsevs are the size of the European Alps in the east of the continent, yet they are totally buried beneath the Antarctic ice.

Named after a Soviet geophysicist who detected them in 1958 during the first International Polar Year exploration, the Gamburtsev mountains are 1200km long, with peaks up to 2700 meters high, intersected by deep troughs and valleys.

The BBC's science correspondent reports the Gamburtsevs are thought to be the location where the ice sheet began its march across Antarctica.

Researchers have told the journal Nature that survey data from the AGAP (Antarctica Gamburtsev Province) project suggests the range first formed over 1 billion years ago.

Airborne radar was used to map the shape of the hidden mountain system in 2008/2009.

Other instruments recorded gravitational and magnetic fields, while seismometers were employed to probe the deep Earth.

A proposal is likely to go to funding agencies soon to drill into the mountains to retrieve rock samples. These samples would confirm the model being put forward in the Nature publication.

The BBC's science correspondent says the search also goes on for a suitable place in the range to drill for ancient ice.

By examining bubbles of air trapped in compacted snow, it is possible for researchers to glean details about past environmental conditions, including temperature and the concentration of gases in the atmosphere such as carbon dioxide.

Somewhere in the Gamburtsev region there ought to be a location where ices can be retrieved that are more than a million years old.

This would be at least 200,000 years older than the most ancient Antarctic ice cores currently in the possession of scientists.