XTRA, XTRA: Read All About The Antarctic Sun

The best and cheapest all-points-north bulletin on the planet is delivered right to your doorstep by clicking The Antarctic Sun, a fun and exciting, web-based magazine with "News about the US Antarctic Program, the Ice, and the People." Funded by the National Science Foundation, The Sun brings you incredible tales and characters from the bottom of the planet (not unlike Antarctica: Life on the Iceby Yours Truly). 

The current edition of The Sun tells the amazing story of a subglacial mountain range beneath the high plateau in East Antarctica "the size of the European Alps but buried below hundreds of meters of ice and snow [that] has puzzled and enticed Antarctic scientists since its discovery 50 years ago."

This photograph by  Doug Wiens accompanies the article.  It is a dramatic and true image of the conditions that Antarctic researchers routinely endure. Click on it to enlarge. Here's the photo's caption from The Sun: 

"Researchers headed into the field for the seismic instrumentation of

the AGAP project in 2007-08 can expect the same sort of extreme weather

conditions experienced during TAMSEIS (2001-03), a project in the

Transantarctic Mountains that used an earlier generation of

seismometers for similar research."

An excerpt follows from The Sun story.

"How did it get there? What does it look like? How tall is it? What role did it play in the formation of the ice sheet?

Those are a few of the questions an international team of researchers

will attempt to answer beginning this season, as they venture into the

Antarctic Gamburstev Province (AGAP), a high-altitude region in East

Antarctica.

“We don’t know why that mountain range is there. It’s really a

mystery,” said Robin Bell, a principal investigator for AGAP’s

aerogeophysical component, nicknamed GAMBIT. “It’s kind of like finding

a mountain range in the middle of Canada.”

A Soviet overland traverse discovered the Gamburtsev subglacial range

during the International Geophysical Year in 1958. Scant other data

exist aside from a few aerogeophysical surveys dating back to the 1970s.

A multi-nation effort to study the subglacial mountain range in more

detail came together as a result of the International Polar Year (IPY).

U.S. investigators are teaming with scientists from the United Kingdom,

Germany, China, France, Italy, Japan and Australia to tackle a place

that is logistically tough to work alone."  The full text at The Antarctic Sun