.....Mountain building
           (..."What keeps building mountains is not obvious"...)

Fig.  1.  Drakensberg Mountains, South Africa.   A classic example of the way in which rock layers of one sort and another are piled one on top of the other to build mountains.  No?  It might as well be, given the other nonsenses that Plate Tectonics expouses.  So how then?  Where precisely do we go in the world to discover the intense deformation (/ "crumpling) of crust - the 'orogenesis'', the 'mountain building' - that builds mountains? Mount Everest?

Plate Tectonics has a peculiar dichotomy when it comes to the notion of  'mountain building' ('orogenesis'), because it's not very clear what it means either by 'mountain',  ..or what it means by 'building'.  It's another of these terms of Plate Tectonics that's loaded with memic, almost mythical emotional appeal, but in actual fact means very little.

"Mountains".  ...It's just a big hill, but we don't, would never dream, of talking about hill-building.  Hills are fren'ly, where sheep safely graze, with maybe a fairy in a dew-spangled dell, but mountains are dark and forbidding, cloaked in snow and ice with gnomes and other subterranean denizens tunnelling deep within by day, and doing unmentionable things to Snowhite by night,  ...or spouting hellfire and fumes and molten rock.  The abodes of Gods.  Whatever, mountains have emotional connotations that hills don't, because they're pointy and steep, and most of all high, a barrier to the outside world, ..where hills allow you to peep over the fence, so to speak.  This emotional baggage of mountains, and the awe and wonder with which they are customarily accompanied is no small consideration when it comes to probing the question (or shall we say 'secret' or even stories and myths) of mountain 'building'.  ("Of course they're built.  How can something that high, ...a wall to the world beyond,  not be built?  It's a lot higher than the wall around the footie ground, ...and *we* built that. So, ..?") ("Arsk yer local God if it's built, ..don't ask me.")

But apart from volcanoes this 'building'  has virtually no vestige in reality.

Volcanoes are the most obvious expression of a mountain that's built,  but volcanoes are not examples of what is generally meant by the term 'mountain building'.  Chains of volcanoes encircle the Pacific, but that is not what is meant by a 'mountain belt' either.  The Drakensberg mountains of Lesotho, South Africa for example are mountains by name as are many others around the world, but they have clearly not suffered any 'building', ...any  'orogenesis', ..any 'tectogenesis', or any other fancy-name genesis, invented to account for the upward construction of these awe-inspiring edifices.  They are manifestly an artifact of erosion, and erosion is the antithesis of building.  Likewise the spreading ridges of the oceans are acknowledged as the most extensive mountain belt on the Planet, but they clearly have not suffered any 'orogensis' (mountain building) either, in the sense meant by Plate Tectonics to describe the upheaval of the crust by crustal crumpling by plate collision that is usually meant to build mountains.  On the contrary spreading ridges are formed by crustal extension.

So what then?  Does that mean there are different sorts of mountains, matched by different sorts of orogenesis?  And if so, what sort of orogenesis / tectonic force was it that pervaded the planet globally to uplift the Mesozoic land surface of the world to form the Great Plateau of Africa (with its Drakens), ...and the other high plateaus from which (by erosion) were carved the Himalayas, the Alps, the American Cordilleras (north and south) and all the other highest mountains of the planet (except volcanoes) (...which are 'built') (...but that is not what is meant by mountain building.)

The answer is none - no sort of 'orogenesis' at all.  Plate Tectonicists don't have an answer for this continuum of elevation.  Instead they invented (and keep reinventing) Plate Tectonics -  a plethora of plates and a frenetic action that would do a fast-car drag meet proud, with its cavalcade of collisions on a roiling mantle boil.  There is no explanation in Plate Tectonics how these "independent plates" get their act together to push up (and 'build') either the linear continuity, or the uniform elevation which the present day mountain belts describe.  In fact Plate Tectonics with its independent colliding plates virtually ignores both continuity and uniformity.  Plate Tectonics has no answer to the question, what causes the elevation of vast tracts of the planet to form plateaus.  Plateaus are simply not accommodated in the grand design of Plate Tectonics, ..not on its horizon.   If they were then Plate Tectonics would not exist, for the field relations of mountains to plateaus, crumpling and erosion is self-evident, and contradicts the very essence of Plate Tectonic theory.  What else can move grown men to write as they do as recently as 1999 something I've always known (and probably you too) since I was a child in geography class, that mountains result from the carving of plateaus by erosion (and not by crustal crumpling)?

But the Earth sciences since then seem to have slipped a disc.  The reality is that there has been no perceptible deformation accompanying this elevation other than the scale-commensurate extensional rifting which has caused mantle extrusion and formed the ocean floors - and the scale-commensurate slumping within the continents and at their margins. that went along with it.

 

But that is very far from the popular thematics expoused by advocates of Plate Tectonics.

So why does the term "mountain building" and its fancier moniker 'orogenesis' pervade the literature and popular belief so, even when the high tracts of the planet are so obviously plateaus, ..and not crumpled.

The short answer is that the belief that mountains are formed by crumpling of the crust (by plate collision) serves consensus very well thank you very much ("The Gift that Keeps on Giving").  Of course geologists recognise the contradictions and conundrums, but there's nothing to be gained, no mileage in addressing the hard questions that lie down that road. Why kill the goose that lays the golden egg when there's more reward in parroting rote liturgy that needs no explanation.

The longer answer is what this site is all about.
 

Question:- So what force is it, that builds 'wrinkled bedsheets' like this one?
Answer:  The same force that is reducing it to rubble.  Gravity

| frontpage | nonsense | expansion |