Antarctica's Hidden Mountains Uncovered

The Gamburtsevs are one of the biggest mountain chains on Earth, but, until now, we had no idea what they looked like or how they formed.

British researchers have mapped out the Gamburtsev Mountains of Antarctica for the first time, which is no small feat because they're buried under more than 600 metres of ice. The British Antarctic Survey spent two years flying over the hidden chain, the peaks of which are some 2,700 metres high, mapping them out with a radar that could penetrate deep into the ice. The team also recorded the gravitational and magnetic fields of the 1,200-kilometre-long chain, and used seismometers to determine what sort of activity was going on under the ice. As for how they were created and then covered, we turn to Jonathan Amos of the BBC:

It is a story that starts just over a billion years ago, long before complex life had formed on the planet, when the then continents were drifting together to create a giant landmass known as Rodinia.

The resulting collision pushed up the mountains, and also produced an underlying thick, dense "root" that sat down in the crust.

Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, the peaks would have gradually eroded away. Only the cold root would have been preserved.

Then, about 250-100 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the planet, the crust started to pull apart in a series of rifting events close to the old root.

This rifting warmed and rejuvenated the root, giving it the buoyancy needed to lift the land upwards once more to re-establish the mountains.

Further uplift still was achieved as deep valleys were later cut by rivers and by glaciers.

And it would have been those glaciers that also wrote the final chapter some 35 million years ago, when they spread out and merged to form the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, entombing the Gamburtsevs in the process.