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A U.S.-led, multinational team of scientists from six
nations will pierce the mysteries of one of the globe's
last major unexplored places this month. Using sophisticated
airborne radar and other Information Age tools and techniques,
the scientists will virtually "peel away" more
than four kilometers (2.5 miles) of ice covering an Antarctic
mountain range that rivals the Alps in elevation, and
which current scientific knowledge suggests shouldn't
be there at all.
What the team hopes to find there are answers to some
of the most basic questions about the nature of the southernmost
continent--and specifically the massive East Antarctic
Ice Sheet--including how Antarctica came to be ice-covered
in the first place, and whether, as many believe, that
process began millions of years ago in the enigmatic Gamburstev
Mountain range.
Working every day at extreme altitudes, in 24 hours of
sunlight and temperatures as low as minus 40 Celsius,
the researchers of the Antarctica's Gamburstev Province
(AGAP) team hope that the technology they bring to bear
will help them answer the question of whether the Gamburstevs
were born of tectonic activity in Antarctica, or date
from a period millions of years ago when Antarctica was
the center of an enormous supercontinent located at far
lower latitudes.
Robin Bell, of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory, who shares the leadership of the U.S. science
effort, said AGAP will help scientists understand one
of Antarctica's last major mysteries. "Because the
heart of East Antarctica is so difficult to get to, we
know very little about it. The Gamburtsev mountain range
is fascinating--it defies all geological understanding
of how mountains evolve--it really shouldn't be there,"
she said. "We think also that there's a strong possibility
that the mountains are the birthplace of the East Antarctic
Ice Sheet. Over 30 million years ago, ice began to grow
around the peaks, eventually burying the range and its
surrounding lakes. I'm really excited that at last we
have a chance to find out what happened."
Added Fausto Ferraccioli, a geophysicist with the British
Antarctic Survey who is leading the United Kingdom's team,
"This is both an exciting and challenging project.
It is a bit like preparing to go to Mars. For two and
a half months, our international teams will pool their
resources and expertise to survey mountains the size of
the Alps buried under the ice sheet, that currently defy
any reasonable geological explanation. At the same time,
we will hunt for ice that is more than 1.2 million years
old. Locked in this ancient ice is a detailed record of
past climate change that may assist in making better predictions
for our future."
AGAP, fittingly, is a high-tech scientific enterprise
involving researchers and support personnel from Australia,
China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United
States, which caps the global scientific deployment known
as the International Polar Year (IPY), the largest coordinated
international scientific effort in 50 years.
The Gamburtsevs themselves were discovered by a Soviet
traverse during the last IPY in 1957-58--then known as
the International Geophysical Year (IGY). Since that time,
the region has been largely untouched.
Traveling deep into the Antarctic interior, more than
630 kilometers (roughly 394 miles) from the South Pole,
the science teams will be based at a pair of remote field
camps while they complete the first major geophysical
survey to ‘map' the mysterious landscape.
The U.S. research teams, from Columbia, Pennsylvania
State University, Washington University in St. Louis,
the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University
of Kansas (CReSIS), the Incorporated Research Institutions
in Seismology (IRIS) and the U.S. Geological Survey, are
supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which
manages all U.S. research on the southernmost continent
through the U.S. Antarctic Program. NSF is also the lead
U.S. agency for IPY.
Bell noted that the AGAP fieldwork is emblematic of the
scientific goals of the current IPY and of the scientific
advances made in the past 50 years because it will use
tools and techniques that were simply unavailable in IGY.
BAS and NSF aircraft, specially equipped with ice-penetrating
radar technology, gravimeter and magnetic field sensors,
will fly survey lines over an area more than twice the
size of California.
"These methods are similar to medical technologies
like X-rays and MRI's that capture images from deep inside
a human body, " Bell said. She added that the scientists
will eventually create a coordinated mosaic of images
drawn from the shallowest layers in the ice sheet down
to regions hundreds of kilometers beneath the hidden mountains,
in effect creating a three-dimensional map of the vast
and unexplored region.
Researchers from Washington University and Penn State
will contribute to the fieldwork by using seismic recordings
of earthquakes to create images of the crust and mantle
beneath the mountain range.
"The images will help determine how the mountain
range formed," said Douglas Wiens, of the Department
of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University.
"We will deploy an array of 23 stations spread over
the mountain range that will gather seismic data."
AGAP scientists added that IPY provided an international
mechanism for coordinating this multinational project
that might otherwise have been very difficult, if not
impossible, to mount successfully.
"This project is possible almost uniquely at this
point in time because of the international framework created
by IPY, which gives researchers from many nations a single
common conduit to pool their efforts for the greater scientific
good," said AGAP researcher Detlef Damaske, of Germany's
Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources.
Mounting AGAP, added Bell and others, is an enormous
and challenging international effort.
In addition to the scientists of the six participating
nations, it requires nine aircraft, the establishment
of two deep-field science camps, and support from the
U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole and McMurdo research stations,
as well as from the Australian Antarctic Davis Station
and BAS' Rothera Research Station. Science and support
teams on the Chinese tractor train from Zhongshan Station
to Dome A will sample ice cores and decommission the U.K.-Australian
Camp. Field depot camps and three other logistics support
stations will ensure that food, fuel, supplies, equipment
and people are in the right place at the right time.
"This project is a major undertaking for IPY,"
said Karl A. Erb, the director of the NSF's Office of
Polar Programs. "No one nation could do this alone.
International collaboration for both the science and logistics
elements is absolutely essential. This partnership illustrates
perfectly how national Antarctic programs can work together
to support and deliver the vital research that help answer
the big, yet basic, scientific questions about our world."
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NSF
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