One of the earliest projects I’ve been involved in since I started working at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is the Antarctica’s Gamburtsev Province (AGAP) project.
The figures below display the bedrock topography of central Antarctica under the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The “Before” figure is a subset of the digital elevation model of Antarctic bedrock created by the British Antarctic Survey(BAS) using data field survey data from the past 50 years. BAS is currently working on a second version of BEDMAP. The “After” figure displays a grid of study area using data collected during AGAP. As you can see, AGAP provided the scientific community with previously unknown topographic detail of the Antarctic bedrock. Both “Before” and “After” figures have the outline vectors of the AGAP survey flights overlain on them to highlight the density of the AGAP survey.
Funding: AGAP is supported by the National Science Foundation Award No. 0632292.
Here is a quick primer on the project:
During the International Polar Year 2007 – 2009, scientists from six nations collaborated on a multi-disciplinary investigation of the Gamburtsevs, the least explored mountain range on Earth buried beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, as part of the Antarctica’s Gamburtsev Province (AGAP) project.
The AGAP project collected more than 120,000 line km of new aerogeophysical data using two Twin Otter aircraft. Data included ice penetrating radar, magnetometer, gravimeter and laser altimeter measurements. The main AGAP survey grid included north-south lines spaced 5 km apart, with crossing lines every 33 km and transects over the Vostok Subglacial Highlands, South Pole and southern Recovery lakes region. 150-MHz ice penetrating radars with bandwidths of 15 to 20 MHz measured ice thickness, bedrock topography, sub-ice hydrology, and produced high-resolution images of the internal structure of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Magnetic data map geologic structures across the mountain range, while gravity data provide new insights into the tectonic evolution and crustal thickness of the region. A swath-scanning laser altimeter with a spatial resolution of 2 meters measured elevation and details of the ice surface.
The Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains of Antarctica, buried underneath 3 kilometers of ice, are as inaccessible a mountain range as it gets on earth.
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