Physical geography

Antarctica and continental drift

The geologic evolution of Antarctica has followed a course similar to that of the other southern continents. The earliest chapters in Antarctica’s rather fragmentary record extend far back, perhaps as much as 3 billion years, into early Precambrian time. Similarity in patterns of crustal and biological evolution in the southern continents can be traced back some 150 million years, and evolutionary courses began to diverge conspicuously by about 70 million years ago, late in the Mesozoic Era. Plant and animal migration routes that apparently had interconnected all the southern continents were largely cut off by the outset of the Cenozoic Era (about 66 million years ago). Antarctica became isolated with the opening of the Drake Passage between the continent and South America sometime between 49 million and 17 million years ago, a time when land mammals diversified and flourished elsewhere, populating all the other continents of the world. Antarctica had long been thought to be a migratory path for marsupials moving between southern continents in early Cenozoic time. But documentation for the theory was not discovered until 1982, when the first mammal remains, a marsupial fossil, were found on Seymour Island in the Weddell Sea. The subsequent growth of Antarctica’s ice sheets cut off any further migrations by land animals.

Now bathed by polar ice, Antarctica has abundant fossil evidence that its climate and terrain at one time supported far more populous flora and fauna than today’s few seedless plants and primitive insects. Much of Antarctica was densely forested in Mesozoic times (about 252 million to 66 million years ago), dominated by southern conifers of podocarps and araucarias, with undergrowth of rainforest-type ferns. Angiosperm trees, particularly the southern beech, Nothofagus, appeared during the Cretaceous Period (about 145 million to 66 million years ago). According to some scientists, the discovery of Nothofagus pollen in the Transantarctic Mountains that dates to approximately 3 million years ago suggests that Nothofagus may have lingered as Antarctica drifted poleward, cooled, and became glaciated. Remains of luxuriant extinct floras—as well as fossils of Mesozoic reptiles, dinosaurs, and amphibians—have been discovered, and these compare so closely to those of other southern continents that many geologists have postulated former contiguity of these lands in a single giant continent called Gondwana. Continental stratigraphic evidence and the dating of seafloors seem to indicate that the supercontinent broke apart along Jurassic rift faults 180 million to 160 million years ago and that fragments such as Africa and Australia separated from Antarctica in Jurassic to Cretaceous time (about 201 million to 66 million years ago) and in the early Cenozoic Era. Early stages of rifting were marked by immense outpourings of plateau lavas (Kirkpatrick Basalt, on Mount Kirkpatrick) and by related sill intrusions (Ferrar Dolerites) across Antarctica, including one of the world’s largest layered gabbroic igneous complexes, the DufekIntrusion, in the Pensacola Mountains.

Modern theory ties mobile zones to the interaction and jostling of immense crustal plates (see plate tectonics). Modern plate boundaries may be far different from ancient ones presumably marked by old fold belts. Ancient Antarctic mobile belts, such as are followed by today’s Transantarctic Mountains, terminate at continental margins abruptly, as if sliced off, and seemingly reappear in other lands across young ocean basins. Much research has been concentrated on attempting to match intercontinentally the detailed structure of opposed coasts, such as between Antarctica and Australia, in an effort to learn whether they had been actually connected before the latest cycle of crustal spreading from intervening mid-oceanic ridges. Similarities between ancient mobile belts now suggest to some geologists that Antarctica may even have been connected to southwestern North America more than 600 million years ago, in late Precambrian time.

Structural framework

Most of the Antarctic geologic record lies hidden beneath the vast regions of snow and ice that make up more than 95 percent of the continent’s surface terrain. No one knows what important segments of the record lie concealed in buried ranges such as the Gamburtsev Mountains, the topography of which has been mapped only by seismic reflections through the great East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The extraordinarily thick cover, the extremely difficult working conditions, and the tremendous expense of mounting expeditions into remote areas have long held geologic knowledge of Antarctica far behind that of other continents. Great advances by geologists of many Antarctic Treaty nations, however, have yielded geologic maps of at least reconnaissance scale for virtually all exposed mountain areas.

From results mainly of British expeditions early in the 20th century, the concept arose that Antarctica is made up of two structural provinces—a long, stable Precambrian shield in East Antarctica and a much younger Mesozoic and Cenozoic mobile belt in West Antarctica—separated by the fault-block belt, or horst, of the Transantarctic Mountains. East and West Antarctica have come to be known respectively as the Gondwana and Andean provinces, indicating general affinities of each sector with other regions; that is, the east seems to have affinity with the Gondwana region of peninsular India, and the west seems to represent a southerly continuation of the South American Andes. As new expeditions study and restudy each range in ever-increasing detail, concepts of the geologic structure are continually modified. Antarctica’s structural record is now known to be more complex than that implied in the past.

The average thickness of the terrestrial crust for both East and West Antarctica approximates that of other continents. Although it has been postulated that West Antarctica might be an oceanic island archipelago if the ice were to melt, its crustal thickness of about 20 miles indicates an absence of oceanic structure. This thickness is similar to that of coastal parts of other continents. The crust thickens sharply along the Transantarctic Mountains front, possibly a deep crustal fault system, and averages about 25 miles thick in East Antarctica. Significant earthquakes are not recorded along this or other known faults in Antarctica, the most seismically quiet of all continents, in which mostly minor activity is associated with surrounding oceanic ridges or volcanoes. However, the occurrence of one unusually large earthquake of magnitude 6.4 in the Bellingshausen Sea (an extension of the Southern Ocean that borders the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula) in 1977 suggests that the Antarctic Plate may have greater seismicity than generally believed.

The ancient crust of Antarctica must have been highly mobile and the configuration of the continent many hundreds of millions of years ago in the Precambrian far different from today’s. Ancient marine and lake basins were filled with a variety of sedimentary and volcanic debris eroded from primeval lands. During mountain-building episodes these materials were complexly deformed and recrystallized deep within the crust to form, particularly in East Antarctica, great crystalline-rock complexes. At the surface, rocks were uplifted and mountains were carved by erosion as sediments filled new basins and new folds of Earth’s crust were formed. Again and again this cycle was repeated during the evolution of Antarctica. Mobility ceased approximately 400 million years ago in the Transantarctic Mountains. Between that time, in the Devonian Period (about 419 million to 359 million years ago), and the Late Jurassic Epoch (which began about 164 million years ago), a series of mainly quartzose (quartz-containing) sediments was laid down in ancient lakes and shallow seas in the sites of former mountain chains that had been carved away by erosion. Known as the Beacon Sandstone, this formation of platform sediments contains a rich record of extinct Antarctic life-forms, including freshwater fish fossils in Devonian rocks; ancient temperate forests, of Glossopteris trees in coal deposits of Permian age (about 299 million to 252 million years old) and Dicroidium trees in Triassic-age coals (those roughly 252 million to 201 million years old); and large reptiles, such as Lystrosaurus, and amphibians in Triassic rocks. In 1990–91 dinosaur fossils were first found in the Transantarctic Mountains near the South Pole; they resembled those of early Jurassic age known from China, and, together with associated plant fossils, they suggest the presence of mild climates at this time in Antarctica, when this part of the continent is believed to have been at a latitude of about 65° S.

Tillites—rocks deposited by ancient glaciers—underlie Permian coal beds in numerous places in Antarctica just as they do in the other southern, including now tropical, continents. The widespread occurrence of glacial erratics, containing microfossils of Cretaceous and Cenozoic age, is an indication of the presence of rocks that are younger than the Beacon Sandstone lying underneath ice sheets near the Transantarctic Mountains. The youngest mountain chain in Antarctica is the southward extension of the Andes Mountains of South America that makes up the Antarctic Peninsula, Ellsworth Land, and part of Marie Byrd Land.