Buried deep beneath East Antarctica’s ice sheet, the Gamburtsev Mountains are the world’s most invisible range. New research suggests that overlying ice like that hiding them from view today could have preserved their rugged topography for the past 300 million years.
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The work bolsters the counterintuitive notion that glaciers, rather than just carving down young peaks into eroded hills like a buzzsaw, could sometimes protect high jagged terrain.
“It’s feasible for topography to be preserved,” says Stephen Cox, a graduate student at Caltech and coauthor of a paper scheduled to appear in Geophysical Research Letters. A supercold cap of ice could have allowed the ancient Gamburtsevs to look like the Alps instead of the highly eroded Appalachians.