Desko Mountains

Desko Mountains
Highest peak	Enigma Peak ( 1000 m )
location	Rothschild Island , West Antarctica
Coordinates	69 ° 36 ′ S , 72 ° 28 ′ W Coordinates: 69 ° 36 ′ S , 72 ° 28 ′ W

The Desko Mountains are a mountain range with a west-northwest-east-southeast orientation on the West Antarctic Rothschild Island northwest of the Alexander I Island . It extends over a length of 30 km from Bates Peak to Overton Peak and has its highest point with the approximately 1000 m high Enigma Peak in the Fournier Ridge .

The German-Baltic seafarer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen sighted part of the mountains in 1821 during his trip to the Antarctic (1819–1821). The French polar explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot also saw it in 1909 as part of the Fifth French Antarctic Expedition (1908–1910). Aerial photographs were taken during Operation Highjump (1946–1947) by the United States Navy and during the Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition (1947–1948). This was used by the British geographer Derek Searle from the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey in 1960 for a mapping. This was made more precise using aerial photographs taken by the US Navy from 1966 and Landsat photographs from 1975. The Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names named the mountain range after Commander Daniel A. Desko (1937–2009) of the US Navy, commander of the VXE flight squadron -6 in Operation Deep Freeze in 1977.

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