The evolution of life on Earth is one of the greatest mysteries of science. But we may have taken this mystery a step further, and ‘supermountains’ called Supermountains may have played a critical role during two of life’s most important biological inflection points.
In a new study published this month in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) reveal that the primeval Nuna and Transgondwana supermountains impacted essential mineral and atmospheric resources on the planet’s surface, thereby starting the world.
Supermountains mountains 3 times bigger than Himalaya
Mountains are formed when tectonic plates in the Earth’s crust collide, as the crust crumples like the hood of a car during a wreck. The process may take tens of millions of years, but the result is that, like the Himalayas, these supermountains are some of the highest mountains on the planet.
About 2 billion years ago, the supercontinent Nuna formed what appears to be a massive mountain range called the Nuna supermount. The same thing happened during the formation of the supercontinent Gondwana about 600 million years ago. Apart from that, the Transgondwana supermountain was formed.
Ph.D. Ziyi Zhu said, “There’s nothing like these two super mountains today.” The candidate at ANU and lead author of the study explained in a university statement: “It’s not just the heights, but if you can imagine it being three or four times the height of the 2,400km-long Himalayala Mountains, you get an idea of the scale.” said.
The second mountain, known as the Transgondwanan supermount, coincides with the appearance of the first large animals 575 million years ago and the Cambrian explosion 45 million years later, when most animal groups appear in the fossil record. ANU researchers point out that the process of oxygenating Earth’s atmosphere and oceans is not constant. Instead, it came in eruptions, coinciding with the formation and erosion of these two supermountains, with the two largest influxes in the process.
Could this be a coincidence?
It is possible, of course, that the existence of a supermountain in the geological record and major evolutionary advances in the same period are unrelated. Yet the evidence is convincing, that is, it is likely to affect, and even though there have been temporal states in our planet’s past so far, the evidence itself is a big deal.
It also provides a logical explanation for the biodiversity we see, based on what we already know. It is never known with 100 percent certainty. But if that’s the case, and if supermountains are a major factor in the evolution of life, it may not only help explain how we got here, but may also assist us in our search for life elsewhere in the universe.
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