Antarctic Alps! And Rivers under the ice?

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Saeltari

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This is very interesting. It shows that the ice there formed fairly quickly. They stated that the Alps are about 50 to 60 million years old but these may be quite a bit older. The article also said they could see liquid below their camps, about 2 miles down in valleys.

Makes a person wonder what discoveries and mysteries are there! :D

-> Alp-sized peaks found entombed in Antarctic ice
 
Deep frozen mountain? I suppose the jagged bits will stop the sheet sliding off in one big lump.

I get this incongruous picture of those heliski maniacs who're always searching for new slopes to slide down digging holes to get to the peaks…
 
Scary...

When you consider there's entire ranges trapped under miles of ice, some places in Antarctica where only the peaks show, those ruddy dry-valleys, ancient 'buried' lakes kept thawed by geothermal heat, ring-of-fire volcanos including the active Erebus...

Um, I'm reminded that 'Alien Earth' hunts now include 'super ice-Earths', 50~~150% bigger, but in Mars-like orbits where life may thrive at Equatorial 'oases', hot springs and/or in the under-ice oceans...
 
I heard someone on the Radio 4 ten o'clock news say that these mountains were very odd: there were no nearby plate boundaries and he said the rocks were (or had been) thought to be Precambrian, meaning that any mountains there would have been smoothed by the ages, not Alpine.

(I can only assume that they got their geology wrong.)
 
From what I dimly remember from my course, there was a plate boundary running through Antarctica. The two plates merged about 65MA ago.

The Antarctica mountains were not formed by the usual method of banging two tectonic plates together and waiting, but by taking a 2 mile high plateau, about the size of France and eroding it away. There are other mountain ranges (Red Sea foothills are that type, iirc) formed this way, but nothing quite on the same scale as Antarctica.

There are entire rivers and lakes under the ice, which have been separated from the rest of the biosphere for about 15MA. IIRC, the Russians where planning on sending something down to see if there was still life (almost certainly) and how it had evolved (15MA provides plenty of time for stuff to evolve)
 
" taking a 2 mile high plateau, about the size of France and eroding it away..."

Thanks !
That got a 'Wow !' here: Needed *seriously* deep time...
 
If there were no ice, the land masses of Antarctica would be like this

IMG_0610.jpeg
 
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