Picturesque and permanently flashing memories of mountains with snow-capped peaks, bare cliffs and forested slopes are able to interest in their diversity. Involuntarily the question arises of how to determine how many years they exist. And which mountains are the oldest in the world? Photos of the oldest of them, as well as their description, are presented in this article.
Features of the old mountains
Those formations that correspond to several characteristics can be considered as such. First of all, no processes take place inside the oldest mountains in the world. They calmed down many centuries ago. Now, figuratively speaking, they do not grow, but, on the contrary, are destroyed by external factors, becoming smaller and smaller. The relief of such formations is smooth, not contrasting, smoothly transitioning from one species to another. In addition, the old mountains do not have sharp slopes and strong elevations. The mountain rivers they have are by no means spontaneous - the valleys have clearly formed over the past centuries.
Vivid examples of the oldest mountains in the world are the Ural, Yenisei Ridge, Timan, Scandinavian and Khibiny on the Kola Peninsula. Some of them will be described below.
Pencil
The Ural Mountains are a chain stretching for a distance of 2 600 km. Due to the differences in relief and long stretch, the Ural Mountains have a huge variety of vegetation and the animals that live here, which are located on a suitable part, where the climate is best suited for certain representatives of the fauna.
One of the oldest mountains in the Ural chain is considered to be the Pencil, an entity that appeared 4.2 billion years ago. Information about this mountain is interesting not only because it is one of the oldest mountains in the world. What features does it have? The mountain is distinguished by the fact that its top and bottom are made of israndite. This is the rarest stone in composition closer to the earth's mantle. It is practically not anywhere else in the world. Today, the earth's crust is very different in composition from israndite, which makes the pencil unique because of this quality.
Due to the influence of the environment, which irreversibly destroys all the oldest mountains in the world, the height of the Pencil today is only 600 m. It received an unusual name from the Turkic language - “Kara-Tash”, which in translation sounds like “black stone” . This fully corresponds to the appearance of the breed.
Mystery of Canada
The presence of such ancient formations has indeed remained a mystery for a long time, but then scientists calculated the age of the rocks located near the village of Nuvvuagittuk. It turned out to be about 4.3 billion years old. Some of the oldest mountains in the world were named after the Eskimo village, located next to the cliffs. The breed, like the Pencil Mountain, is considered rare. It is called tonalin, and in appearance resembles quartz.
In addition, igneous rock is not the only basis. Near Nuvvuagittuk there is a large number of mountain volcanic rocks. Not all scientists agree on the age of the mountains, and therefore, disputes have not yet stopped regarding this moment. Consequently, it is not possible to single out plausible information.
Scandinavian mountains system
This is a system of mountain formations, "hugging" the entire Scandinavian peninsula. Previously, it was a whole ridge. But over time, many plains formed, which now replace the once peaked impressive cliffs.
The time of formation is not known for certain. According to various sources, it varies from 4.8 to 3.9 million years. It is only known for certain that the ridge began to form in the Caledonian era. On average, the height of the plateaus is now not more than 1000 m.
When the continents were not yet formed, ice tongues reached the territories of modern North America, Great Britain and Spinzbergen. Later, ice from above significantly changed the mountain range: continuously acting on them, it contributed to a significant decrease in height, erosion of slopes and the formation of U-shaped depressions. Now granite debris can be found far from Scandinavia.
How can I find out the age
To understand what mountains are the oldest in the world, help a variety of methods for the study of rocks. For example, you can approximately determine the age of certain strata of rocks - the further they occur, the older, and vice versa. There is a paleontological method based on identifying age from the remains of extinct animals.
Another method is uranium-lead. It consists in calculating the age of the oldest igneous rocks, however, one should take into account where the oldest mountains in the world are located, to which this method will be applied.
The article described only a few possible ways of calculating age. There are a lot of such methods that make it possible to understand whether the mountains are long-lived or have formed recently. Exploring the planet, scientists continue to discover new details about its origin.