The Andes Mountains Could Collapse

While mountains generally look like they've been there for ages, in some cases that's not true – at least as far as geology goes. Through the nature of their profession, geologists look at things that are, for instance, 120 million years old and say that they are fairly young. Such is the case with the Andes mountain range, which spans the two American continents, but which is considered a teenager among the world's mountains, and that now seems to have some growing problems. Recent studies performed in this range have revealed the fact that they are shrinking in some regions.

“We found that parts of the Andes are undergoing a cycle of collapse which started some 6 million years ago,” Geologist Folguera Andres explained, quoted by the BBC News. He studied the mountain range together with fellow Geologist Victor Ramos, also from the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), in Argentina. They learned that some regions showed obvious signs of drop in altitude, a process that got them thinking. As opposed to the San Juan sector of the Andes, which is growing, the regions of Mendoza and Neuquen clearly show signs of decreased altitude.

Despite the fact that they stretch more than 7,500 kilometers on the eastern coast of the Pacific Ocean, the Andes are among the Earth's youngest mountains, at barely 120 million years of age. “The Andes were formed because the bottom of the Pacific Ocean went under the South American continent at an angle of approximately 30 degrees on average. But there are some places where the ocean floor goes in horizontally, increasing the friction and pushing up the mountain range above, as at the Cordillera Blanca of Peru,” Andres said.

Because every five to ten million years the tectonic plates under the Andes tend to start sliding against each other again, there's a good chance that the mountains on top could crumble. “Before the Andes were formed there were numerous Andean chains that ran along the edge of South America and many of these chains suffered cycles of collapse,” Andres revealed. It may be, researchers believe, that the mountain chain we now see as belonging to this area is just the last in a long line of others that came before it, all generated by the immense friction forces at work between the Pacific and the South American tectonic plates, respectively.