A new study has found that the erosion of great mountain ranges may have provided critical oxygen and nutrients that spurred the development of the earth’s first organisms. “There’s nothing like these two ranges today,” lead author and geochemist Ziyi Zhu said in a release on Feb. 3. Zhu and colleagues made the discovery by tracking traces of zircon with low lutetium content, which is found only in the roots of high mountains. “It is not just their height, imagine the 2,400 kilometre-long Himalayas repeated three or four times you get an idea of the scale,” Zhu said about their paper published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. They found the largest of these supermountains only formed twice—the first between 2,000 million and 1,800 million years ago and the second between 650 and 500 million years ago when tectonic plates crashed together. These two periods correspond with major …
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