Antarctic Mountain Range Discovered.

[Big Orange]

Let's hope they don't uncover any openings that lead into underground ruins inhabited by flesh eating blobs:

Mountain range as large as Alps found under Antarctic ice
Subglacial mountains mapped by scientists 2.5 miles under ice

A mountain range as large as the European Alps is hidden under 2.5 miles of ice in the east of Antarctica, scientists have revealed. The range includes peaks up to 3,000m above sea level and raises questions over how the massive ice sheets on the continent formed.

The subglacial mountains were first detected by Russian researchers more than 50 years ago and are named after a Soviet geophysicist, Grigoriy Gamburtsev. But, despite a small survey carried out in the 1970s, the size and shape of the Gamburtsev mountain range has remained a mystery.

"When we went out to the ice, we knew there was a potentially elevated region there, but we had no idea what it looked like," said Fausto Ferraccioli, a geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey who led the UK team within the international mapping project. "We now see that this mountain-range is the size of the Alps, but it looks like them too — it has all these fresh-looking peaks and valleys."

The seven-nation research team that produced the map worked for weeks in the harsh conditions around Dome A, the highest point on the Antarctic ice sheet. The average temperature was a chilling -30C. To examine the buried mountains, they flew aeroplanes fitted with radar, magnetic and gravity sensors over the ice, with the measurements allowing them to "see" the rock beneath.

Researchers constructed a map that revealed a mountain range at least 800km long and up to 400km wide, covering an area the same size as the Euopean Alps, at more than 200,000 square kilometres. Their survey also showed peaks of 3,000m above sea level and valleys down to 1,000m below sea level. The highest peak in the Alps, Mont Blanc, rises more than 4,800m above sea level but the valleys in this area are typically just 500m deep.

This vast range between the peaks and valleys surprised the scientists — such high mountains, which are normally the result of collisions between tectonic plates, should not exist in the centre of an ancient continent. "We're in the middle of an ancient pre-Cambrian craton, so we shouldn't have mountains there at all," said Ferraccioli.

The new maps also raise questions about how the ice sheets formed. The Gamburtsev mountains are thought to be the nucleus around which the vast 10m-square-kilometre East Antarctic ice sheet, the biggest mass of ice in the world, formed. If the ice grew slowly, the scientists would have expected to see a plateau under the sheet, with the moving ice and water having eroded the peaks of the mountains.

"But the presence of peaks and valleys could suggest that the ice sheet formed quickly – we just don't know. Our big challenge now is to dive into the data to get a better understanding of what happened."

Robin Bell, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, highlighted another surprise: "The temperatures at our camps hovered around -30C, but three kilometres beneath us at the bottom of the ice sheet we saw liquid water in the valleys. The radar [data] let us know that it was much warmer at the base of the ice sheet."

Ferraccioli said the new map, completed as part of the International Polar Year, was just the start of their understanding of the Gamburtsev mountains. "I like to compare this to the first page of a new book — a huge new dataset which will provide us with an understanding of the mountains and the origin of the Antarctic ice sheet." The survey planes flew a criss-cross path which charted the area with 20 times more detail than previous maps of the area. The research team plans to release more data about the mountain range, including the maps of another 400km of mountains.

The next steps include studying the different layers of ice in the sheet, to work out where they could drill to find the oldest ice. Such ice cores can provide detailed histories of past climate change on Earth and indicated how the planet will respond to greater concentrations of CO2 in its atmosphere. Scientists will also refine the magnetic and gravitational measurements to reveal further details of the submerged mountains.

The Guardian

[Junghalli]

Amazing (though when you think about it not terribly surprising) to think that after all this time we were still so ignorant of something like the topography of our own planet. Really brings home how much humanity still has to learn.