QUICK FACTS
Name: Unnamed Peak in the Ellsworth Mountains
Location: Antarctic
Contact details : -79.9774614356392, -81.95892707235716
Why it’s amazing: The mountain looks like a man-made pyramid.
A mountain hidden in a sea of snow Antarctic looks surprisingly like a ancient egyptian pyramid seen from above. But no human (or extraterrestrial) hands were needed to build this peak: it was forged during the slow, grinding process of erosion.
The pyramid mountain, which has no formal name, became famous on the Internet in 2016but scientists probably knew that before, Mauri Peltoprofessor of environmental science at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts, previously told Live Science. A research base for climate scientists is just south of the mountain, in an area called Patriot Hills, and “you can probably see that mountain from up there,” Pelto said.
Related: ‘We were in disbelief’: Antarctica is behaving in ways we’ve never seen before. Can he recover?
The Antarctic “pyramid” is approximately 1,265 meters high, about one-fifth the height of Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. It has four steep slopes and is located in the southern Ellsworth Mountains – a range of jagged peaks first spotted during a flight by American aviator Lincoln Ellsworth in 1935, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS). research paper published in 2007.
The region is known to be home to minerals dating back 500 million years. fossils of trilobites and other creatures dating from the Cambrian period (541 million to 485.4 million years ago).
The mountain’s sides were likely sculpted and smoothed into a pyramid shape by hundreds of millions of years of erosion. Specifically, the rocks may have been subject to freeze-thaw erosion, which is when water and snow fill small cracks during the day and then freeze at night, Pelto explained. Water expands in cracks as it freezes, causing the gaps to widen under the resulting pressure and eventually causing large chunks of the mountain’s rock to break off.
Three of the pyramid mountain’s sides appear to have eroded at the same rate, while the fourth side, the eastern ridge, formed independently, Pelto said.
Freezing and thawing erosion likely also forged other pyramidal mountains, such as the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps, Pelto added.
Miscellaneous conspiracy theories emerged to explain the shape of the Antarctic pyramid when it went viral in 2016, with theorists considering the involvement of a forgotten civilization or aliens from outer space.
But “it’s just a mountain that looks like a pyramid”, Eric Rignotprofessor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine and principal investigator at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, previously told Live Science. “Pyramid shapes are not impossible: many peaks partly resemble pyramids, but they only have one or two faces like this, rarely four.”
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