Public Release: 

Fountain of youth underlies Antarctic Mountains

New study explains why peaks buried in ice look so young

The Earth Institute at Columbia University



More surprising still, the scientists discovered a vast network of lakes and rivers at the mountains' base. Though water usually speeds erosion, here it seems to have kept erosion at bay. The reason, researchers now say, has to do with the thick ice that has entombed the Gamburtsevs since Antarctica went into a deep freeze 35 million years ago.

"The ice sheet acts like an anti-aging cream," said the study's lead author, Timothy Creyts, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "It triggers a series of thermodynamic processes that have almost perfectly preserved the Gamburtsevs since ice began spreading across the continent."




The researchers say that the mechanism that stalled aging of the Gamburtsevs at higher elevations may explain why some ridgelines in the Torngat Mountains on Canada's Labrador Peninsula and the Scandinavian Mountains running through Norway, Sweden and Finland appear strikingly untouched. Massive ice sheets covered both landscapes during the last ice age, which peaked about 20,000 years ago, but many high-altitude features bear little trace of this event.

"The authors identify a mechanism whereby larger parts of mountains ranges in glaciated regions--not just Antarctica--could be spared from erosion," said Stewart Jamieson, a glaciologist at Durham University who was not involved in the study. "This is important because these uplands are nucleation centers for ice sheets. If they were to gradually erode during glacial cycles, they would become less effective as nucleation points during later ice ages."

Ice sheet behavior, then, may influence climate change in ways that scientists and computer models have yet to appreciate. As study coauthor Fausto Ferraccioli, head of the British Antarctic Survey's airborne geophysics group, put it: "If these mountains in interior East Antarctica had been more significantly eroded then the ice sheet itself may have had a different history."


Other Authors

Hugh Carr and Tom Jordan of the British Antarctic Survey; Robin Bell, Michael Wolovick and Nicholas Frearson of Lamont-Doherty; Kathryn Rose of University of Bristol; Detlef Damaske of Germany's Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources; David Braaten of Kansas University; and Carol Finn of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Copies of the paper, "Freezing of ridges and water networks preserves the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains for millions of years," are available from the authors.

Scientist Contact

Tim Creyts

Fpr more information, contact Kim Martineau, Science Writer, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.


