Mountains Actually Shoot Up in Spurts – Paart I

A little over two years ago we wrote a series of articles about the way mountains grow that met with a lot of resistance among people who decided to parrot their beliefs based on old paradigms in their comments. In fact, the idea of the Andes shooting upward “overnight” so to speak especially by the average individual and typical geologists. However, now, two years later, what we wrote about has been coined the “Blob Effect” and is beginning to be recognized by mainstream science as a very likely case scenario for mountain building—a scenario which is both “rapid” and “sudden.”

This new understanding was partially pioneered by Carmala N. Garzione (left) of the University of Rochester, who was quick to say “We've always assumed that the folding and faulting in the upper crust produced high elevation mountains.” However, around two years ago, her beliefs began to morph into a new paradigm regarding mountain building. Her more recent comment, “Now we have data on ancient mountain elevation that shows something else is responsible for the mountains' uplift," suggests her changing attitude based on the studies she has made in the Andes Mountains of South America, considered the youngest mountain range, yet the tallest in the Western Hemisphere, and certainly one, she claims, has shown a tremendous and sudden movement upward defying all the old beliefs.
    In the past, it was generally accepted by NASA and the National Science Foundation, that the rise of the Andes was 1.4 inches per year of the Nazca plate sliding smoothly under South America, with another 1.3 inches per year locked up at the plate boundary, squeezing South America, and was released every hundred years or so in great earthquakes. About 0.3 inches of motion per year crumples South America, building the Andes. Then, two years ago, Garzione found that mountains, especially the Andes, shoot up in spurts as much as two and a half kilometers (8,202 feet) in 7 million years, as opposed to the 70 million years previous understood. Now, however, that 7 million years is being downgraded to 2 million years.
    The problem scientists face, obviously, is that their measurement techniques are minimal at best, since they are trying to measure something that cannot be seen (techtonic plate and their assumed movement) and the height of a mountain growth over millions of years. Now for the scientist, that is really not a major issue, since we are still talking about inches in hundreds of thousands of years. However, the issue then becomes one of exactly how much time are we discussing? If the world is, indeed 4.55 billion years old, then mainstream science is correct and the movement or growth of mountains is so slow by our life-cycle standards, it really doesn’t matter one bit.

 Top: a “Blob” forms along the bottom of the Mantle, these are anchors, keeping the crust from rising and in place; Middle: the density of the “Blob” or anchor begins to falter, its density buildup is too heavy to be held by the Mantle or Lithosphere, as the crust begins to rise slightly; and Bottom: the “Blob” or anchor melts and falls into the Astenosphere to begin again, and with the loss of weight the crust shoots upward, as Casione puts it, “like a popsicle”

    On the other hand, what if the Earth is not that old? What if God knows something that man does not know about mountain building? What if He can alter, change, increase, speedup the process, etc.? As an example, what if God can alter what has been found by Garzione and her colleagues as the “Blob Effect” from a slow process of heating and separating to a much quicker process—say hundreds of years instead of millions? Or even hours? If that is the case, then He can speed up the movement upward of a mountain increasing in height to very short periods of time—all it takes is the increasing of heat to melt the “anchors” (the blob) of the mantle that keeps the crust from expanding upward in those areas where mountains, either buckling, folding, or in the case of Garzione’s words, “popping” upward?
    Consider what we do not know: Despite all the fancy drawings to the contrary, we do not know anything about what is further down into the Earth than we have been able to drill and see for ourselves—the deepest borehole ever drilled to-date is by a Russian project in the far north Kola Peninsula during the 1980s that reached 7.46 miles, or just over 2410 feet (2410.07873)—we have barely scratched the surface of our planet.

 

The Crust is brown, the top of the mantle is gray—the project is to drill down to the gray mantel

According to CNN, there is a project to drill down to the Earth’s mantle, at a project cost of $1 billion. A team of international scientists plan to drill into the Earth's mantle in an attempt to answer questions about the origins and evolution of life. The drills are planned to get through almost four miles of oceanic crust to reach the mantle, and to a point that begins three to five miles under the oceans to as much as 25 miles under continents. The mantle itself is believed to be 1864-miles thick through the slowly deforming rock between the crust and the core which makes up the majority of our planet—and bring back the first ever fresh samples.

Pipe that would be used to drill into the mantle 

Part of this new understanding is the evaluation and measurement of temperatures along the Andes over the past few years concentrating on the Bolivian Altiplano, which is a large, high elevation basin in the Andes Mountains in South America. There Garzione and her team took samples of sedimentary rock that had accumulated between 12 million and 5 million years ago (geologically speaking) from erosion of the surrounding ranges. One type of mineral, carbonate, precipitates from surface water, so the composition of the carbonate is a good indicator of the composition of rainfall.
(Continued in the next post, “Mountains actually Shoot Up in Spurts, Part II,” regarding how mountains have recently been found to have formed sudden and rapid rising based on new understandings of the developing roots beneath the crust that form and act as an anchor until the root becomes too weighty and dislodges, falling into the liquid mantle, allow the earth’s surface to suddenly “bob” upward).