At mountains they form beautiful backdrops, true postcards! But what exactly is a mountain?
By definition, the Mountain is an elevation in the relief with a height of 300m or more in relation to the surrounding area. It is important to realize that there is a difference between mountain and mountain range, because the mountains have lower altitudes and rounded tops.
When a mountain is grouped with a series of several existing mountains, we say that there is a mountain range or a mountain range. There are many examples of this in the world, such as the Andes Mountains in South America, the Alps in Europe, the Rocky Mountains in North America and the Himalayas in Asia. In the last one is the Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, at 8,848 meters above sea level.
Mount Everest, the highest mountain on the planet
At the top of the mountains, the climate is usually very specific, with a lot of humidity and very low temperatures, in addition to a reduced atmospheric pressure, which is explained by the
relationship between altitude and climate: the higher the relief, the lower the temperatures. These climatic factors, in addition to the steep relief, make the existence of life very difficult in these environments.How are mountains formed?
Most mountains form from the tectonic activity, that is, when two tectonic plates collide and cause a change in the relief, which results in the elevation of their shapes. This process is given a very strange name: “orogeny”.
There are other mountains that are formed by the action of volcanism, basically when a lot of lava accumulates. (which solidifies and turns into rocks) around volcanoes along thousands and thousands of years old.
In addition to these two processes, there are other occurrences, such as the erosion of the relief in the surrounding environment or the accumulation of debris, but these are phenomena that rarely occur in nature. The two explanations given above are the most common manifestations.
In most cases, the presence of mountains indicates that the local relief is relatively young, that is, it has some tens or hundreds of millions of years, which sounds like a lot, but it's nowhere near the 4.5 billion years that planet Earth It has. This means that in a few more millions and millions of years the external relief agents (rain, wind, weather, etc.) will slowly erode these mountains until they give rise to other forms of relief.
By Me. Rodolfo Alves Pena
