It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Originally posted by Doug Fisher
Later iterations of the design like Hadji Ahmed's were unaware of the correlation between Western Antarctica and these two islands and consequently the islands began to look less and less like Antarctica's Carney and Siple and more like the actual Unfortunate Islands discovered during Magellan's voyage:
-Doug
"If the ice sheet grew slowly then we would expect to see the mountains eroded into a plateau shape. But the evidence now suggests it formed quickly. - Geophysicist Dr Fausto Ferraccioli of British Antarctic Survey
"Antarctica's ice sheet formed about 32-million years ago but [Tom Jordan of BAS] said that experts now believed the oldest ice was only 1.4-million years old."
LINK
The findings, published in the journal Science, confound a traditional view that ice sheets are almost solely formed by snow that lands on top, gets compressed into ice and flows slowly towards the oceans because of gravity.
'We usually think of ice sheets like cakes - one layer at a time added from the top. This is like someone injected a layer of frosting at the bottom - a really thick layer,' Robin Bell, lead author at Columbia University in New York, said.
The scientists said that about 24 per cent of the ice in an area around Dome A, a 13,800ft high plateau the size of California that forms the top of East Antarctica, was formed by re-frozen ice.
'In some places up to half the ice thickness has been added from below,' they wrote of ice above the invisible Gamburtsev Mountain range.
Are we just one find away from the ice sheets being dated in thousands of years?