Queen Alexandra Range
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Queen Alexandra Range is a major mountain range in Antarctica, about 160 km (100 mi) long, bordering the entire western side of Beardmore Glacier from the Polar Plateau to the Ross Ice Shelf. Alternate names for this range include Alexandra Mountains, Alexandra Range and Königin Alexandra Gebirge.
The highest peak of the range is Mount Kirkpatrick at 4,528 metres (14,856 ft). Other peaks in the range include Mount Dickerson (4,120 m), Decennial Peak (4,020 m), Mount Stanley (3,220 m) and Mount Bishop (3,020 m).
This mountain range was discovered on the journey toward the South Pole by the British Antarctic Expedition (1907-09), and was named by Ernest Shackleton for Queen Alexandra of England. Shackleton and his men, and a later expedition headed by Robert Falcon Scott, both collected rock samples from the range that contained fossils. The discovery that multicellular life forms had lived so close to the South Pole was an additional piece of evidence that accompanied the publication (in 1910 and independently in 1912) of the theory of continental drift.
