Mystery of Antarctica's huge, ghostly mountain range
St. Boris Peak is glaciated, but imagine a whole mountain range buried under about 2,000 ft (609.6 m) of ice. Boris has an elevation of 1,665 m. Location: Friesland Ridge, Tangra Mountains, Livingston Island in Western Antarctica. Credit: Wikimedia user Apcbg
Expeditions are underway to explore what scientists call the “new frontier” at Earth’s poles.
Under the banner of The International Polar Year, over 50,000 scientists from 60 nations are working together to understand our changing planet. Earth & Sky spoke with geophysicist Robin Bell of Columbia University. She talked about her upcoming study of the Gamburtsev mountain range in Antarctica. The Gamburtsevs are the size of the Swiss Alps, but lie covered like a ghost under a white sheet of ice more than 600 meters, or about 2000 feet thick. And there’s more to the mystery.
Robin Bell: We don’t really even know how old it is. We don’t know whether it was formed in the last 10 million years or the last billion years. And that makes a big difference in terms of ice sheet models and long term ice sheet stability.
Younger and hotter mountains, Bell said, would add more heat to the ice sheet than if they were older and cooler. The melting and thinning in Western Antarctica, and record low sea ice this year in the Arctic give polar scientists a sense of urgency.
Robin Bell: What’s shocking us is the fact that we can see significant changes in our planet in the polar regions. Suddenly, the changes that we’re seeing at the pole are happening on a human time scale.
Our thanks today to NASA, in celebration of the International Polar Year.
Survey targets ‘ghost’ mountains
Our thanks to:
Robin Bell
Geophysicist
Doherty Senior Research Scientist
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Columbia University
New York, NY
and
Director, ADVANCE Program at the Earth Institute
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University
Palisades, NY
The ice on Antarctica is building at a record rate. The place is not melting. At the north end, the ice is returning at a fast rate.
Don’t forget, the northwest passage was navigated by ship in 1905 and 1941. The place has melted before and likely will again. We do not know what the temperature was “supposed to be” sans human influence and therefore have nothing to base any “findings” on.
THe one constant in the earth’s climate is change. There is no evidence that I have seen to show global warming nor the human causation if it were to be occurring. Take a look at how many scientists are distancing themselves from the IPCC garbage they called a scientific report.
Yeah and it is not that all the sudden these changes are happening it is that scientists just studied them in the past 100 years or so. Scientists just dont have real proof of anything. They say Earth is millions of years old and yet in a period of 100 years you say Antarctica is going through lots of changes? You say dinosours lived on Earth for a few million years but in 100 years Antarctica is melting? Why dont you spend the money you use to study Antarctica on trying to invent more efficient energy sources.
So why then have we not seen any large-scale major changes in Antarctica or the Arctic in the few hundred years we’ve known about their existence and been exploring them? (thousands of years in the case of some Arctic regions)
How can you say that we have no idea what the temperature of earth “should be” without human influence? Humans have been on earth for thousands of years, but we haven’t influenced the global environment at all until the last 200 years or so. That’s quite a long time of human existence and science to figure out what earth’s “normal” temperature should be.
The problem with people who don’t believe that humans could impact the global environment is that they rely too much on the information that is brought to them rather than the information they’ve taken the effort to find. If you want to learn about anything, then the media is the last place to be looking. There are too many people who benefit from “reporting” news and science one way or the other for it to be a reliably source of information.