Peak under the ice
A team of scientists have successfully mapped a huge mountain range buried in the Antarctic.
It's almost impossible to visualise the Gamburtsevs, which match the Alps in scale but are buried 4km below the ice.
Four kilometres. That's a crazy amount of ice.
One of the biggest results of the study, which used radar to peer through the white stuff, is that the range not only is the same size of the Alps, but looks like them too. All high peaks and cavernous valleys.
It was expected the peaks would be more like plateaus - worn away by the gradual accumulation of the polar cap 30 million years ago.
The Gamburtsevs are thought to be where the glaciers that formed into the huge ice sheet originated. And now it seems if this is where those glaciers were created, they were created fast.
![ghistmountains[3].jpg](http://blogs.sundaymercury.net/weirdscience/ghistmountains%5B3%5D.jpg)
Next up for the researchers is too find the best place to drill down into the ice and pull up frozen water dating back more than a million year. The air trapped in the ice will reveal what the atmosphere was like back then and will allow us to track changes in the climate.
Here are a few, ahem, cool Antarctic facts:
If Antarctica's ice sheets melted, the worlds oceans would rise by 60 to 65 metres - everywhere.
The cold and dry conditions in the 'Dry Valleys' region of Antarctica are so close to those on Mars that NASA did testing there for the Viking mission. It has not rained in the dry valleys for at least two million years.
Antarctica is the windiest place on earth with gusts up to 327 km/hr having been recorded.
The Antarctic ice cap has 29 million cubic kilometres of ice. This is 90 per cent of all the ice on the planet and between 60 and 70 per cent of all of the world's fresh water.
Antarctica has an area of 13,900,000 sq km - that's almost twice the size of Europe or about the same size as the USA and Mexico combined.
Antarctica is so cold, nothing can rot.
More than 150 lakes have been found under the ice.
Antarctica was imagined by the ancient Greeks, but not seen until 1820. The first time anyone there set foot there is claimed to be the following year.
Weird Science Factoid: Every year about 98 per cent of atoms in your body are replaced. I'm literally not the man I once was.
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
