Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Current Events #1


Gamburtsev 'ghost mountains mystery solved' 

by Konathan Amos  

Source: BBC

Date of 17 November 2011

The Gamburstev mountains are the same size as the Alps and are buried beneath the Antarctic Sea. The Gamburstev was discovered in 1950s and was a great surprise. The researches tell that this range was formed over a billion years ago. The Gamburtsevs are really important because they are believed to be the location where the sheet we know today is Antarctica. " Surveying these mountains was an incredible challenge, but we succeeded and it's produced a fascinating story,: quoted.Dr Fausto Ferraccioli. Searching these mountains history is helping scientists understand not just past changes on Earth but they could possibly find scenarios that could happen in the future. 

Dr Fausto Ferraccioli was a principle investigator for Antarctica's Gamburtsev Province project.They were trying to find a hidden shape of a mountain system using ice-penetrating radar. The other instruments they used were the seismometers and they could record the local gravitational and magnetic fields on the ice sheet surface. The AGAP team believes all this data that they found could make a huge story for Gamburstev's creation and persistence through geological time. This was a story that started over a billion years ago. It was long before when complex life had formed in the world, after this happened they continents were sliding which ended up creating a giant landmass called Rodinia. This was kind of an explosion and it pushed up the mountains and also produced and underlying think, thick root on the crust. It's believed that about 250-100 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the planet, the crust started to pull apart in a series of rifting events close to the old root. To some extent , the AGAP's survey has actually depressed this quest. The radar data has indicated the base of the sheet has been severely disrupted by water that has been freshly frozen, layer upon layer, on to the bottom of the ice column.

I choose this article because it was really interesting for me because of what people can find about the past in cool ways, however it didn't relate to are unit at the moment, it was quite fun to read and write about.  I think this is reliable because they have so many evidence. For example graphs, charts and pictures and also the AGAP team is really professional. This relates to science because what people are trying this day are really different. The researches try to find the past and predict the future one day. 



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