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A giant impact crater beneath the Wilkes Land ice sheet was first proposed by Richard A. Schmidt in 1962 on the basis of the seismic and gravity discovery of the feature made by the U.S. Victoria Land Traverse in 1959–60 (VLT), and the data provided to Schmidt by John G. Weihaupt, geophysicist of the VLT (Geophysical Studies in Victoria Land, Antarctica, Report No. 1, Geophysical and Polar ...
The frozen continent of Antarctica was the last continent humanity set foot on. The first documented landings made below the Antarctic Circle took place in 1820, when Admiral Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and the crew of the Vostok and Mirny, as part of the Russian Antarctic Expedition, made land at Peter I Island and Alexander Island.
The Bransfield Strait, the result of this extension, is presumed to be four million years old or less; [2] magnetic anomalies created by the formation of new basaltic crust [6] and aligned with the axis of the Bransfield Rift [2] indicate that the newly formed oceanic crust in the Bransfield Strait is roughly 1.3 million years old. [2]
The Antarctic plate is a tectonic plate containing the continent of Antarctica, the Kerguelen Plateau, and some remote islands in the Southern Ocean and other surrounding oceans. After breakup from Gondwana (the southern part of the supercontinent Pangea ), the Antarctic plate began moving the continent of Antarctica south to its present ...
The Ca-Al-rich inclusions, which formed 2 million years before the chondrules, [1] are a key signature of a supernova explosion. c. 4,567 ±3 Ma – Rapid collapse of hydrogen molecular cloud , forming a third-generation Population I star , the Sun , in a region of the Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ), about 25,000 light years from the center of ...
The loss of this ice sheet would take between 2,000 and 13,000 years, [98] [99] although several centuries of high greenhouse emissions could shorten this time to 500 years. [100] A sea-level rise of 3.3 m (10 ft 10 in) would occur if the ice sheet collapses, leaving ice caps on the mountains, and 4.3 m (14 ft 1 in) if those ice caps also melt ...
Estimates on when the planet’s inner core may have solidified — when iron first crystallized at the center of the planet — once ranged from 500 million to 2.5 billion years ago.
The icing of Antarctica began in the Late Palaeocene or middle Eocene between 60 [121] and 45.5 million years ago [122] and escalated during the Eocene–Oligocene extinction event about 34 million years ago. CO 2 levels were then about 760 ppm [123] and had been decreasing from earlier levels in the thousands of ppm.