Journey to the Center of the Ice

[austenandrews]

Here's a cool place for a lost world: Giant caves under the Antarctic ice sheet.

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090224/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_antarctica_mountains

 

Jagged mountains the size of the Alps have been found entombed in Antarctica's ice, giving new clues about the vast ice sheet that will raise world sea levels if even a fraction of it melts, scientists said on Tuesday.

 

Using radar and gravity sensors, the experts made the first detailed maps of the Gamburtsev subglacial mountains, originally detected by Russian scientists 50 years ago at the heart of the East Antarctic ice sheet.

 

"The surprising thing was that not only is this mountain range the size of the Alps, but it looks quite similar to the (European) Alps, with high peaks and valleys," said Fausto Ferraccioli, a geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey who took part in the research.

 

This is the part that got me thinking:

 

The team of experts from Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Germany, Japan and the United States also found water below the ice, using survey aircraft that flew 120,000 km (75,000 miles).

 

"The temperatures at our camps hovered around minus 30 Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit), but 3 km (2 miles) beneath us at the bottom of the ice sheet we saw liquid water in the valleys," Robin Bell, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, said in a statement.

 

Many sub-glacial lakes have been found in Antarctica in recent years.