The three major ranges and other lesser features were sighted and named in February 1931 by the British Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition under Douglas Mawson.

He chose the site for the Mawson Station on the coast to the north of the Framnes Mountains for the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE).

They have dark, weathered charnockite bedrock that is littered with light-coloured quartz-rich, granitic gneiss glacial erratics.

[4] The geology of the Framnes Mountains is very similar to that of the Eastern Ghats in India, which lay beside the Mawson Coast before Gondwana broke up.

The mountains are mostly formed of charnockite, a homogeneous brown rock similar to granite that mainly consists of potassium feldspar, quartz and pyroxene.

[5] The charnockite contains regions up to 20 kilometres (12 mi) wide of the older metamorphosed sedimentary rock, one of which includes most of the Casey Range.

Painted Peak in the North Masson Range is an example, composed of rocks that were metamorphosed and deformed 1200 to 1000 million years ago.

Common minerals in the metamorphosed sedimentary rocks include cordierite, sillimanite, spinel, garnet and biotite.

[3] The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) formed about 34 million years ago, and seems to have persisted since then with periodic fluctuations in thickness between glacial and inter-glacial cycles.

[3] The David and Masson ranges divide the ice flow in the Framnes Mountains into three outlet glacial streams, which cover an area of about 2,400 square kilometres (930 sq mi).

[9] There are diverse biological communities in a series of deep epiglacial lakes[a] in the Framnes Mountains about 30 kilometres (19 mi) inland from Mawson Station.

One lake had a cyanobacterial mat under the ice with a community of grazing animals that included nematodes, tardigrades and perhaps copepods.

A massive mountain, 970 metres (3,180 ft), rising through the ice sheet 5 miles (8.0 km) southeast of Holme Bay and a like distance northeast of the north end of the Masson Range.

Mapped by Norwegian cartographers from air photos taken by the Lars Christensen Expedition, 1936–37, and named Trillingnutane (the triplet peaks).

Mapped by Norwegian cartographers from air photos taken by the Lars Christensen Expedition, 1936–37, and named Hånuten (the shark peak).

Mapped by Norwegian cartographers from air photos taken by the Lars Christensen Expedition (1936–37) and named Sortindane (the southern peaks).

A jagged, razor-backed ridge and a few nunataks in a line extending north–south, standing 8 miles (13 km) west of David Range, in the Framnes Mountains.