Transantarctic Mountains

The Transantarctic Mountains (85°00′S 175°00′W / 85.000°S 175.000°W / -85.000; -175.000) are a mountain range in Antarctica which extend, with some interruptions, between Cape Adare and Coats Land, these mountains serve as the division between East Antarctica and West Antarctica. They include the contiguous but separately named mountain groups along the west side of the Ross Sea and the western and southern sides of the Ross Ice Shelf; also the Horlick Mountains, the Thiel Mountains, Pensacola Mountains, Shackleton Range and Theron Mountains.

The mountain range stretches between the Ross Sea and the Weddell Sea the entire length of Antarctica, thence the name. It reaches heights of more than 4,500 ms. At between 100 and 300 km wide the range forms the boundary between the east Antarctic and the west Antarctic ice sheets. The summits of the mountains are some of the few places that break through the Antarctic ice sheet emerging as inselbergs. The dry valleys lie near McMurdo Sound and represent a special Antarctic phenomenon: landscapes that are snow and ice free due to the extremely limited precipitation and ablation of ice in the valleys.

With a total length of about 3,500 km, the Transantarctic Mountains are one of the longer mountain ranges on Earth. The highest mountain is 4,528 m high Mount Kirkpatrick.

The Transantarctic Mountains are considerably older than other mountain ranges of the continent that are mainly volcanic in origin. Their genesis began about 65 million years ago, at the beginning of the Cenozoic. The mountains consist mainly of sandstone and dolerite, that formed upto 400 million years ago (during the Silurian period).

The name "Transantarctic Mountains" were recommended in 1962 by the US-ACAN committee, a US authority for geographic names. This purely descriptive label (in contrast to many other geographic names of the seventh continent) is internationally accepted at present.

Geology

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