Astro Weekly: “The Mountain"

I find few things more awe-inspiring and humbling than planet Earth’s mountain ranges.  Formed over tens to hundreds of millions of years, mountains are made manifest by the unparalleled power of plate tectonics. As plates scrape past one another, diverge, and crash together, the rocky crust of our planet is torn, exhumed, deformed, and uplifted. Mountains like the great Himalaya rise 9 percent of the way to the Earth-space boundary, and multi-billion-year-old ranges that were once of equivalent size have been eroded and, now, their metamorphic cores are exposed at sea level. The rock cycle is an untiring process and the mountain landscapes we see today are just a minuscule snapshot in geologic time—a fraction of a frame in the great movie of Earth’s history.

This morning, I gazed upon the Bridger Range and found some inspiration. Being familiar with the geologic history of the area, I know that the ranges formed through a series of tectonic events beginning in late Jurassic time (about 155 million years ago). Over my morning coffee, I considered the history of these mountains on a human time scale (something that is rather hard to do). I abandoned my thought experiment after realizing that the very mountains I was looking at probably look nearly identical to how they did when our Mesopotamian ancestors were creating the first written language and inventing the wheel. Sure, maybe slight differences in drainage geometry, climate, and vegetation, but the structural framework of the mountain range has not changed significantly since the foundation of the Sumerian civilization 8,000-10,000 years ago. As the great Carl Sagan once said, “Think of how much blood has been shed, how many leaders have risen and fallen, and how many empires have been established and dissolved since the first human civilization.” The mountains remain as they were, unphased by our petty arguments, overly-complex human brains, and our insatiable hunger for change. It is for this reason, among others, that I am constantly humbled by the dominating feature of Earth’s land—the mountain.