… when the mountains were missing from the earth for a billion years and the development of life had stopped, what …

How are mountains falling?

Assistant Professor Tang of Peking University of China told Live Science that there were no mountains like the continents in the ‘Middle Age’ of the Earth. Due to the level, nutrients were not reaching the oceans and complex life was not developing. The continental plates of the earth rise up the mountains at the boundaries where the crashes occur. This process is called orogenesis. Here the crust is thick and the surface rocks are elevated due to the effect of magma. However, erosion and gravity push them downwards. When the tectonic plate and magma process stop, the mountains start to cut. (Photo: NASA)

How did you know the history of mountains?

The highest mountains cut over time. Therefore, studying the ancient thickness of the earth’s crust makes it easy to find out how actively the mountains were formed. For this, the researchers of the study analyze the changes in the composition of the zircon mineral that formed billions of years ago in the crust. Today they are easily found in zircon sedimentary rocks. From these it can be found that when they were made, what was the condition of the crust.

Due to the thick crust, higher mountains are formed. Thickness affects how the magma’s texture changes. The shift from zircon crystals to magma can be detected. Earlier in January, Tang and his colleagues found in a study that the thickness of the earth’s crust can be detected by the amount of europium in the zircon crystals. The more Europium, the thicker the crust. (Alchemist-hp (pse-mendelejew.de) CC0 public domain)

Development of life was stopped

The most important thing is that when this erosion was happening in the mountains, the development of life on the earth was stopped. Tang has reported that it is believed that life between 1.8–0.8 billion years was thought to be a slow evolution. Eukaryotes were born 1.7 billion years ago, but their rapid development occurred 0.8 billion years ago, while the Cambrian explosion that occurred 300 million years ago introduced most of the organisms seen today. The reason behind this has not been known but its association with the erosion of the mountains can be seen. (Photo: NOAA)

What is the connection?

Actually, when new mountains are not formed, new nutrients (nutrients) do not come out of the mantle on the surface of the earth. Lack of nutrients like phosphorus on the surface also reduces them in the oceans, which go into the oceans with the help of a water cycle and speed up the development of life. Their lack of life stalled the oceans. This development began when supercontinent Nuna Rodinia broke out in the Proterozoic period. (Photo: NOAA)