Mountains Actually Shoot Up in Spurts – Part II

Continuing from the previous post 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.

According to Jonathan Sherwood (left), of the University of Virginia, in “The Measure of Mountains,” not only is Garzione changing the way geologists think about the rise of mountain ranges, her findings show “A remarkable growth spurt for a mountain range that now features peaks between 17,000 and 23,000 feet.”
    According to Garzione, “the composition of rainwater changes with altitude. More than 99 percent of the oxygen in water is made up of oxygen-16 and less than 1 percent of oxygen-18.” Her point is that as vapor rises in the form of clouds to higher altitudes, oxygen-18 is removed from the cloud in rainfall, leaving the cloud more and more depleted in the isotope. “This change locks into the minerals that formed at the surface from rainwater.” This resulted in accumulated minerals collecting in sedimentary basins in Bolivia to become the rock strata Garzione sampled.
    As Jonathan Sherwood stated: “The second method looked at the same Bolivian sediment, but focused on the temperature at which the surface-forming carbonates were created. Atmosphere once again played a key role since air temperature decreases with altitude, meaning a temperature-based recording of the rocks' original altitude should be preserved.”

Garzione, along with Dr. Prosenjit Ghosh Professor of Geology at Max Planck Institute (far left) and Dr. John M. Eiler Professor of Geology and Geochemistry, of the California Institute of Technology (left), employed a technique developed at CalTech that looks at the abundance of oxygen-18 and carbon-13 that are bonded together.
    This results in individual atoms vibrating vigorously and their breaking of bonds with other atoms in the high temperatures of the warm climate at low elevations in the Andes. From this the team gauged the temperature in which the carbonates formed, ranging from the icy cold peaks of the Andes to the heat of the Amazon jungle. This CalTech measurement method showed that between 10 million and 7 million years ago, the Andes shot up—a fact that scientists wouldn’t believe. As Garzione stated, “When I first showed this data to others, they had a hard time believing that mountains could pop up so quickly.”
    However, if the Andes actually rose such a dramatic amount as suggested by the studies, scientists would be able to assign a very specific, though controversial process to their uplift. As Garzione stated: “It took a lot of supporting data from the new paleotemperature technique to become accepted and gain confidence in the uplift history, then the processes that caused the mountains to rise can be determined."
    The unscientific name of "Deblobbing" is given to a dense root that becomes unstable and begins to flow downward into the Earth’s mantle from the weight of its own mass. This “blob” acts like an anchor, and weighs down the entire range from rising beneath the Earth’s crust until it detaches.
    When two tectonic plates collide, such as the Nazca oceanic plate in the southeastern Pacific colliding with the South American continental plate, the continental plate usually begins to buckle. This is because the plates, floating on a liquid mantle, press together resulting in the buckling which begins the first swell of a mountain range.

When the “Blob” or anchor melts away into the Asthenosphere, the weight holding the crust in place is suddenly released and the Mountain root, the density of the mountain is also released and “shoots” upward 

    It should also be noted that there is a kind of buckling going on below the crust in the solid portion of the upper mantle, creating a dense root clinging to the underside of the crust. This root grows in combination with the rising mountains above, acting like an anchor, keeping the buckling mountains from rising in a manner somewhat like a weight on a small fishing bobber that holds the bobber low in the water.
    Thus, before the mantle root finally detached in the Andes, the mountains had already risen nearly a mile. With the sudden elimination of the anchor when it detached, sinking the root into the liquid mantle, the mountains suddenly "bobbed" high above the surrounding crust, and “in a short geologic period, lifted from about 2/3 of a mile to about 2 ½ miles.” It was like cutting the line to the fishing weight.
    It should also be noted that this process has been proposed since the early 1980s, but it could never be proven since the techniques to determine it had not been developed until just recently. As Garzione added, "People have largely ignored the role of the mantle lithosphere because it is difficult to look 50 to 200 kilometers into the earth; whereas we can easily see the deformation on the surface."

We cannot see into the past to verify first hand or prove any belief or philosophy—we can only test under very imperfect means to arrive at a hypothesis or assumption 

    The problem, of course, has always been associated with time and view—we cannot see into the Earth’s interior and we do not have the capability of looking backward over millions of years for so-called evidence. "Some geologists have guessed,” Garzione continued, “that the mantle lithosphere is removed continuously and evenly during mountain building. Our data argue that the mantle just accumulates down there until some critical moment when it becomes unstable and drops off."

That critical moment of destabilizing occurs when two tectonic plates collide—in the case of the Andes, it would be when the Nazca oceanic plate running all along the South American continent from the tip of Colombia to nearly Tierra del Fuego, and as far westward as the Galapagos in the north and to around Eastern Island in the south, collides eastward into the South American continental plate, causing the continental plate to buckle. Floating on a liquid mantle, the plates press together and the buckling creates the first swell of a mountain range as the Nazco plate slides underneath the South American Plate. In this process, the growing root, which had been acting as an anchor, is dislodged and falls into the liquid mantle as the growing mountain above swells or “bobs” upward, surging the mountains to higher elevation.