The Origin of Mountains (Hardcover)

This volume describes mountains from all over the world, with an emphasis on mountain landforms, but also looks at their rocks, structure and age. This leads to a deduction on the mechanism which formed them, causing the authors to reject the pre-conceived and well known hypothesis that plate tectonics and folding creates mountains. The book approaches mountains from facts about mountain landscapes rather than theory. It illustrates that almost everywhere, mountains arose by vertical uplift of a former plain, and by a mixture of cracking and warping by earth movements, and erosion by rivers and glaciers, the present mountainous landscapes were created. It also gives evidence that this uplift only occured in the last few million years, a time scale which does not fit the plate tectonics theory. Another part of the evidence, shows that mountain uplift correlates very well with climatic change. Mountain building could have been responsible for the onset of the ice age. It certainly resulted in the creation of new environments.