What are the forces that formed Antarctica?

rmchair theories are one thing. Penn State geoscientists, with colleagues from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Alabama, are embarked on a project to take the true measure of the frozen continent. By stringing arrays of seismic stations across thousands of kilometers of icy desert, then analyzing the shifts and tremors their instruments pick up, they hope to better understand the crust and mantle beneath the Transantarctic mountains, the range that splits the continent into east and west.

Eight seismic stations are already in place. Over the next month, the 15-member TAMSEIS team (that's for Transantarctic Mountains Seismic Experiment) will be installing 36 more. First, they'll complete a dense array in the vicinity of McMurdo Station, hub of the U.S. Antarctic program. Then comes the hard part: extending a 1,400 kilometer chain of stations across the vast east Antarctic plateau. For that, team members will be dropped by Twin Otter airplane to a remote camp at 12,000 feet, where they'll spend two weeks in a place where the air is thin and the daytime highs are minus-25 degrees Celsius. Talk about going to extremes!

Team member John Pollack, a freelance journalist, will be sending regular dispatches on the expedition's progress. Grab some hot chocolate and follow along.