Mountains 101

Week 2
2.1 Deep Time
- Burnets Theory of the Mundane Egg
- when the floods of Genesis receded, they left chaos being.
- Buffon estimated the world to be 75000 years old
- Catastrophism: school that believed that the history of the earth was
dominated by major geophysical revolutions that convulsed the planet
with water and ice and fire and had all but extinguished life
- natural disaster shaped the earth
- Uniformitarianism believed the earth had never had a global
catastrophe
- events had occurred, but not to a large scale

2.2 Current Theories of Mountain Building

- Earths surface is broken into several rigid plates
- lithosphere: crust and upper mantle
- plates glide on the asthenosphere
- ocean plates are thinner, but more dense
- divergent plate boundary
- convergent plate boundary: when plates collide, it can form a
mountain
- transform margin

2.3 Types of Mountains

- volcanic mountains:
- formed when has-rich molten rock moves to the surface, erupts,
accumulates, and cools.
- volcanoes are associated with three basic tectonic regions
- rift valley spreading centers (Kilimanjaro)
- convergent boundaries (Mount Fuji)
- intraplate hotspots
- convergent mountains:
- most common
- Fault-block mountains:
- faults in the Earths crust allow portions of the surface to drop
and others to rise as opposed to the earth folding over and bending
under pressure and heat
- Dome Mountains
- great amount of magma pushing itself up under the earths
crust
- Northern Great Plans

3.1 Global Climate Drivers

- climate is generally predictable
- weather changes
- three primary forces that regulate mountain climates
- latitude, elevation, continentality
- intertropical convergence zone
- low atmospheric pressure due to high temperatures
- Coriolis Effect

3.2 Local Climate Drivers