Many of the mountain ranges we walk and climb up would be far less vertiginous were it not for the lubricating effects of plankton, a new study has revealed. Two billion years ago, a boom in the microscopic marine organisms led to prime conditions for orogeny, or mountain building. As the Earth's tectonic plates collided, the carbon from dead plankton on the sea bed became slick graphite under heat and pressure, which acted as a lubricant enabling the sliding, stacking and folding of the Earth's crust to form mountain ranges. Without it, friction would quickly have ground things to a halt, making molehills rather than the lofty peaks we know and love today.
Excellent article- thanks! We’ve got really diverse set of rock types in the UK and it’d be interesting to see some more on the geological formation of our mountains & crags
News Place Nicknames Added to Tool to Aid Emergency Services
Ordnance Survey is inviting emergency service organisations around Great Britain to input local and colloquial nicknames to a new database called the Vernacular Names Tool, as an aid to getting responders to the right location even if...