Researchers Find a Super Mountain 3 Times the Length of the Himalayas

KOMPAS.com – Scientists discovered a huge mountain range that had been missing for so long.

Geologists refer to the mountain range as Supermountain.

The reason is, the mountains stretch for thousands of miles splitting two continents or can be said to be three times longer than the Himalayas.

Reported from Space.com, postdoctoral student at The Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Ziyi Zhu revealed that there is no mountain resembling Supermountain this.

“You can imagine the Himalayas being 1,500 miles (2,400 km) long and this repeating three or four times, that’s a scale picture Supermountain,” he said, Wednesday (9/2/2022).

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Supermountain in the history of the earth

Invention Supermountain become the pinnacle of history and not only provide stunning views.

Research conducted by Ziyi Zhu and his colleagues stated that the formation and destruction of Supermountain this may have triggered the biggest evolutionary explosion in Earth’s history.

Previously, the evolutionary explosion occurred about 2 billion years ago. Followed by the Cambrian eruption 541 million years ago.

“Probably, when Supermountain eroded, they throw large amounts of nutrients into the ocean thereby speeding up energy production,” he wrote, in the February 15 issue of the Journal of Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Space.com, Wednesday (9/2/2022).

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Supermountain Formed

Basically mountain ranges are formed when the Earth’s tectonic plates continue to rub together destroying two landmasses simultaneously.

The friction pushes the rock to the surface and soars at a certain height.

Actually mountains can grow for hundreds of millions of years, even more. But these mountains are also subject to erosion from wind, water, and other forces that can erode the peaks.

Scientists gather the history of Earth’s mountains by studying the minerals left behind by those peaks.

Zircon crystals, for example, form under high pressure deep beneath mountains and can persist in rocks after the parent mountain has vanished.

Through the content of elements in this zircon crystal, researchers can determine the conditions, time, and location of the crystals formed.

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Two Supermountains found

The latest study, reported by Space.com, mentions that researchers have examined zircon with low amounts of lutetium and concluded that there are two formations supermountain in the history of the Earth.

The first took place about 2 billion to 1.8 billion years ago. While the second took place from 650 million to 500 million years ago.

It is suspected that the first supermountain was the Transgondwanan SuperMount, because it crossed the supercontinent of Gondwana or a giant continent containing the modern landmass of Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica, India and the Arabian Peninsula.

Temporary supermountain the other is Nuna Supermountain.

These two ancient supermountains were enormous. It likely spanned more than 5,000 miles or 8,000 kilometers. That’s about twice the length from Florida to California.

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The existence of the Supermountain in evolution

“Eroded mountains will dump a number of nutrients, such as iron and phosphorus into the ocean through the water cycle,” said Ziyi Zhu, Wednesday (9/2/2022).

These nutrients can accelerate biological cycles in the oceans and promote evolution.

In addition to the abundance of nutrients, the eroded mountains also release oxygen into the atmosphere and make the Earth more hospitable to the living creatures on it.

Historically, the formation of the Nuna Supermountain coincided with the appearance of the first eukaryotic cells on Earth.

Eukaryotic cells are cells that contain a nucleus and eventually evolve into plants, animals, and fungi.

Meanwhile, the Transgondwanan Super Mountain is about to erode just as another evolutionary explosion occurs in Earth’s oceans.

“The Transgondwanan SuperMountain coincided with the appearance of the first large animals 575 million years ago and the Cambrian explosion 45 million years later, when most animal groups appeared in the fossil record,” he added.

Meanwhile, other studies have found that the formation of mountains on Earth had stopped, around 1.7 billion to 750 million years ago.

At the same time life on Earth also stopped evolving

Therefore, scientists hypothesize that the lack of new mountain formation has prevented nutrients from being eroded into the oceans thereby hindering the evolution of living things on Earth.

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