Decipher the mystery

The latest survey data shows that the mountain range deep beneath the Antarctic ice sheet has been "dead and alive" hundreds of millions of years ago.

The Gamburtsev range - about the size of the Alps in Europe - lies deep beneath the south-east polar ice sheet. The discovery of this mountain range in the late 50s of the last century was a great surprise for researchers.

The Gamburtsev Range is the place where the famous ice strip began a 'march' across Antarctica. This mysterious mountain decoding will provide more information for climate studies, helping to understand the previous changes on the earth and the future scenarios of the green planet.

Dr. Fausto Ferraccioli, principal investigator of the project 'Gamburtsev province of Antarctica' (AGAP), and his colleagues flew back and forth on the eastern part of the white continent, drawing a mysterious mountain range shape by radar penetrating tape, using seismometer probe deep inside the earth. The AGAP group believes that all these data can explain the formation of the Gamburtsev range.

Sketching a 3-dimensional image of the Gamburtsev series, the upper floor is a cover of ice

The story begins more than 1 billion years ago, long before life formed on the green planet, when the continents were drifting. The impact then formed mountains and also created a dense 'root' below, in the earth's crust.

Over hundreds of millions of years, these peaks slowly wear out, only the cold base is preserved. Then, about 250 million to 100 million years ago, when the giant dinosaurs walked on the planet, the earth's crust began to rupture. The crack warmed and revived the base, giving it the power needed to lift the soil again to recreate the mountains. The lifting process continued as deep valleys were cut off later by rivers and glaciers.

And those same glaciers also wrote the last chapter about 35 million years ago, when they merged together to form the southeastern ice sheet, burying the Gamburtsev range.'This research answers the mystery of how there are young mountain ranges in an old continent. In this case, the Gamburtsev range may have been completely worn out and miraculously resumed , ' Dr. Robin Bell - another member of the research team - told the BBC.

The next phase of the study will be to drill through the ice and into the mountain to collect the first stone samples of Gamburtsev.