Alps-sized mountain range found in Antarctic ice

JAGGED mountains the size of the Alps have been found entombed in Antarctica’s ice, scientists said yesterday.

The discovery provides new clues about the vast ice sheet that will raise world sea levels if even a fraction of it melts.

Using radar and gravity sensors, experts made the first detailed maps of the Gamburtsev subglacial mountains, first detected by 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.

He said the mountains would probably have been ground down almost flat if the ice sheet had formed slowly. But the presence of jagged peaks might mean the ice formed quickly, burying a landscape under up to 4km of ice.

Ferraccioli said the maps were “the first page of a new book” of understanding how ice sheets behave, which in turn could help predict how the ice will react to global warming.

Antarctica, which is bigger than the US, has been swathed in ice for about 35 million years.

It contains enough ice to raise world sea levels by about 60 metres if it ever all melted so even a fractional melt would affect coasts around the globe.

“Unless we have a basic understanding of how ice sheets work, any sort of predictive model won’t match reality,” Ferraccioli said.

The UN panel on climate change says that greenhouse gases, mainly emitted by burning fossil fuels, will bring more heatwaves, floods and droughts, and raise sea levels.

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

“The temperatures at our camps hovered around minus 30 Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit), but 3km 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.

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

Geologists say that mountain ranges such as the Alps or the Himalayas form in collisions between continents.

The last time Antarctica was exposed to such forces was 500 million years ago.

“The mystery here is that the Alps are only 50 to 60 million years old, while here we have a mountain range that may perhaps be as old as 500 million years,” Ferraccioli said.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a Nobel Prize-winning UN scientific network, has forecast that oceans may rise up to 23 inches this century, from heat expansion and melting land ice, if the world does little to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for atmospheric warming.

But the UN panel did not take Antarctica and Greenland into account, since the interactions of atmosphere and ocean with their enormous stores of ice — Antarctica has 90% of the world’s ice — are poorly understood.

And yet the west Antarctic ice sheet, some of whose outlet glaciers are pouring ice at a faster rate into the sea, “could be the most dangerous tipping point this century,” says leading US climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen.