The Gasp Menagerie: Mountains Of Madness Discovered?
Oh, Lovecraft. One of the things I love most about good old HP and his mythos is that it changes you, much like many of the people in his stories. Once you dive into the Lovecraftian world, you start to look for traces of it when you encounter the weird, the cosmic, the wrong things of our universe.
One of my favorite Lovecraft stories, “At the Mountains of Madness” involves the discovery of thoroughly alien creatures and civilizations among mountains in Antarctica. The tale has inspired the imagination of many other storytellers, most notably the “Thing” in the ice that menaced MacReady and crew in the legendary Carpenter film.
Now, we may have found evidence that these mountains might actually exist, locked away for eons in ice, frozen and perfect. According to a story in the Daily Mail, the Gamburtseve Mountains in Antarctica have finally been revealed visually via modern technology. These mountains exist over two miles below the ice on the frozen continent, even though they rise 8800 feet above sea level.
Discovered in 1958, it was over 50 years before scientists could get a look at them via new imaging technology. The haunting grayish pictures led to them being nicknamed “the ghost mountains” by those who first viewed them.
Without getting into the technical talk, the mountains are truly bizarre: Rivers flow uphill, aging and erosion have stopped completely, everything about them is perfectly preserved and held in time. A mountain range older than most on the planet, yet appearing as if they erupted from the earth just yesterday.
What secrets might they hold? If the ice was ever penetrated, or melted away, what would be revealed? What evidence of eons past are frozen there… dormant… sleeping?
Categorized:News
