Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
223
probably some crevasses, but Long and Darling were stout lads and the sun didn't set.
Who needed to sleep anyway? Carrying no survival gear, they set oV bound to touch
rock. About eight hours later they reached the northernmost toe of outcrop at the moun-
tain's edge (Fig. 7.7). The rock was granite, perhaps as expected. Long could see that far-
ther on the granite rose in a fourteen hundred-foot cliV and was topped by sedimentary
layers. These were the rocks that he most wanted to examine and collect, but climbing to
them was out of the question. They had already pushed themselves to the limit. So they
collected a few small specimens of the crystalline rock and trudged the 16 miles back to
camp, arriving about sixteen hours after they had left.
The Sno-Cats managed to back out of the ice stream and pulled on east toward the
small range Long had spotted earlier in the season. Each time the Sno-Cats stopped,
Chapman would set up his theodolite and shoot a set of angles on bedrock points. In a
week the party camped near the foot of a mesa whose sides were sheer cliVs of granite
capped by a relatively thin section of sedimentary rock. The contact between the sedi-
mentary layers and the granite five hundred feet above camp was the same unconfor-
mity exposed at the previous stop and throughout the Transantarctic Mountains (Figs.
7.8, 7.9).
Beyond the mesa, a more massive mountain rose several thousand feet above the sur-
rounding ice. It was largely plastered over with snow, but a broad, smooth ridgeline with
Figure 7.8. although the
ohio Range is nearly
inundated by the East and
West antarctic Ice Sheets,
it nevertheless displays
the unconformity found
throughout the Transant-
arctic Mountains, with
Beacon sedimentary rocks
overlying an erosion sur-
face on older granite, as
seen in this image of the
escarpment to the east of
Darling Ridge. Photo by
Karl Kellogg.
