Expedition set for 'ghost peaks'
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News

Tented camp (BAS)
Working deep in the interior is challenging at the best of times

It is perhaps the last great Antarctic expedition - to find an explanation for why there is a great mountain range buried under the White Continent.

The Gamburtsevs match the Alps in scale but no-one has ever seen them because they are covered by up to 4km of ice.

Geologists struggle to understand how such a massif could have formed and persisted in the middle of Antarctica.

Now, an international team is setting out on a deep-field survey to try to get some answers.

The group comprises scientists, engineers, pilots and support staff from the UK, the US, Germany, Australia, China and Japan.

It's rather like being an archaeologist and opening up a tomb in a pyramid and finding an astronaut sitting inside. It shouldn't be there
Dr Robin Bell, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

The ambitious nature of the project - working in Antarctica's far interior - has required an exceptional level of co-ordination and co-operation.

"You can almost think about it as exploring another planet - but on Earth," said Dr Fausto Ferraccioli from the British Antarctic Survey.

"This region is a complete enigma. It's in the middle of the continent. Most mountain ranges are on the edges of continents, and we really can't understand what these mountains are doing in the centre."

The AGAP (Antarctica's Gamburtsev Province) project will establish two camps from where the team will map the subglacial range using surface and airborne instruments.

The Gamburtsevs were discovered by a Soviet team making a traverse across the ice in the late 1950s. The rocky prominence was totally unexpected; scientists thought the interior of the continent would be relatively flat.

"There are two easy ways to make mountains," explained Dr Robin Bell, from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who is a lead US researcher on the expedition.

"One is colliding continents, but after they collide they tend to erode; and the last collision was 500-million-plus years ago. They shouldn't be there.

"The other way is a hotspot, [with volcanoes punching through the crust] like in Hawaii; but there's no good evidence for underneath the ice sheet being that hot.

"I like to say it's rather like being an archaeologist and opening up a tomb in a pyramid and finding an astronaut sitting inside. It shouldn't be there."

Dr Robin Bell says the team will perform an x-ray of the ice sheet

The mountains are believed to have been a key nucleation point for the vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

It is thought that as Earth's climate cooled just over 30 million years ago, the snows that fell on the mountains produced mighty glaciers, which then merged to form one giant spreading ice-mass.

A better understanding of these events could give clues as to how Antarctica might evolve in the coming centuries if, as expected, the Earth continues its current warming trend.

more at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7668070.stm