Ellsworth Mountains

The Ellsworth Mountains form a 350-kilometer-long, 48-kilometer-wide chain in West Antarctica on the western edge of the Ronne Ice Shelf, holding Mount Vinson, at 4,892 meters the highest peak on the continent, making this the highest mountain range in Antarctica. The range is built from a discrete crustal block called the Ellsworth-Whitmore Mountain terrane, containing a roughly 13,000-meter-thick sequence of folded Cambrian to Permian sedimentary strata resting on much older Grenville-age continental basement rock. Those layers accumulated during the early Paleozoic as part of the assembly of the supercontinent Gondwana, and the terrane is thought to have once been part of the Cape Fold Belt before rifting away from southern Africa and later becoming incorporated into Antarctica. Major folding and deformation of the sedimentary rock occurred during the Gondwanide orogeny, with later uplift raising the range to its present height. This entity documents the Ellsworth Mountains specifically as a geological formation, a range of folded Paleozoic strata raised by the Gondwanide orogeny after rifting from Gondwana.