The Amazing Life Cycle of Mountains | SciShow Compilation

[Music] mountains are some of the biggest things around but something that big takes a lot of energy to create and not all mountains are made the same way but once a mountain forms that's far from the end of the story sometimes it keeps growing so here's how they go from a regular old piece of earth to the tallest peak at least for now starting with the basics of plate tectonics at 8 848 meters above sea level mount everest reaches farther into the sky than any other peak on our planet it's often called the roof of the world but it might also be pretty close to the ceiling the upper limit of mountain height see a mountain can't just rise indefinitely there are limits much of this has to do with how mountains form most major mountain ranges come about where two segments of earth's crust are crashing slowly into each other though the earth's crust is solid rock it still changes shape under enough pressure and when rock pushes up against rock you end up with what's called crustal shortening as the plates squish together and crustal thickening as the crust bunches and bulges like a carpet pushed against a wall this can gradually push parts of a plate kilometers into the air forming mountains through what geologists call uplift mount everest and the surrounding himalayas are a result of a particularly forceful collision between what is now india and the rest of asia which created a lot of uplift but like with everything on this planet gravity ultimately gets the final say mountains are really heavy and that mass causes the underlying crust to bend and sag like a person sitting on a trampoline which lowers the peak somewhat and if those peaks grow tall enough they can become so heavy that their weight overpowers the tectonic forces pushing them upward and uplift stops as the pieces of crust keep pushing together the pressure leads to shortening and thickening under lower peaks instead causing the slopes on either side of the central peaks to rise so when the mountains can't grow upward anymore they expand outward into plateaus this has been observed in mountains all over the world from the rockies to the andes to the himalayas and though we don't have an exact number for max height we can assume everest is pretty close to it since it and other mountains in its range started growing outwards instead of up but the mountain might be a bit shorter now than it used to be and that's because there's another possible limiter on mountain size ice the idea is that once a peak reaches high enough into the atmosphere glaciers begin to form which then slowly carve at the summit you see mountains all around the world seem to top out at about 1500 meters above the local snow line an altitude which varies depending on the climate of the region and this trend suggests that glacial erosion carves away mountains faster than they can grow their tallest peaks a hypothesis known as the glacial buzzsaw but there are some mountains that don't seem to suffer from the glacial buzzsaw highly active volcanoes it's not because their lava melts the ice or anything but because they form somewhat differently from other mountains mauna kea on the island of hawaii measures more than 10 000 meters from its base at the seafloor to its peak making it technically taller than everest though the majority of it is underwater it's so big because it's a shield volcano that formed through successive eruptions depositing layer upon layer of lava like other mountains mauna kea causes the crust beneath it to sag downward it and its neighbor mauna loa depress the sea floor by as much as 6000 meters but that weight doesn't keep it from growing since its growth doesn't depend on tectonic uplift and it's thought that the speed of volcanic buildup can outpace glacial erosion in fact mauna kea probably would be taller except it lost its fuel source the mountain formed because a mantle plume beneath the crust produced magma which powered the volcano but now the plate has moved it away from the plume slowing the pace of eruptions there are bigger mountains in our solar system though on mars the crust doesn't move around like it does on earth and there's less gravity pulling things down which is how olympus mons is able to reach a staggering 25 000 meters above the surrounding plains sadly a mountain that large is probably not possible on earth physics just aren't on our side so earth's crust smashing into itself might not sound super sophisticated but it definitely gets the job done unfortunately that's kind of a brute force growth technique and sometimes it has very devastating consequences like leaving earthquakes in its wake so here's more on how this side effect of growing mountains works it was late afternoon on march 27 1964 when the ground in south central alaska began to shake as it never had before in north america and never has since for more than four minutes centuries of accumulated compression were suddenly released the magnitude 9.2 earthquake caused part of the alaskan coast to lurch forward more than 20 meters the resulting landslides and mudslides devastated towns and cities in some areas unstable land began to behave like water causing buildings and roads and pipelines to sink into the ground and dozens of tsunamis the largest of which topped out at 67 meters high caused catastrophic damage along the bays and inlets of the coast more than 125 people died in the good friday earthquake which was felt over an area of about 1.3 million square kilometers and it released more energy than the combined power of every north american quake since it's been 50 years since north america's largest recorded quake and its legacy remains enormous because it was this natural disaster that ushered in the modern age of earthquake science to understand what caused the great alaskan earthquake and really the majority of all earthquakes we have to start with plate tectonics take a look at a map of earthquake activity today and you'll find that most of the seismic events all over the world take place along the edge of oceanic incontinental plates there are seven of them all told that together make up the earth's lithosphere the outermost shell of the planet where you find the crust in the upper mantle these plates are constantly moving and they interact with each other in lots of different ways they can move apart from each other creating a space known as a divergent plate boundary when this happens magma the molten rock beneath the surface usually seeps up to fill the crack and form new crust along the boundary plates can also push up against each other creating what's called a convergent plate boundary tectonic plates move slowly just a few centimeters a year but over millions of years these collisions can create whole new mountain ranges as one plate is pushed up and the other sinks below the surface finally tectonic plates can slide slowly alongside each other creating what we call a transform boundary you won't generally find any mountain ranges or lava along these boundaries but you will find the makings for an active earthquake zone all these interactions seem pretty obvious to us today but not so much just a half a century ago the theory of plate tectonics had actually been proposed a full 50 years before the 64 quake by german meteorologist alfred wegner but the idea that the earth's surface floated around in pieces was ridiculed at the time and wegener's career was all but ruined but in the decades that followed new generations of geologists began discovering things like huge rifts on the ocean floor which turned out to be the boundaries of wegner's plates even so by the early 1960s some scientists saw new crust forming in the middle of the oceans those divergent plate boundaries as evidence that the planet was actually growing larger each year that was the only way they could think of to explain where the other end of the plate had gone that alaska quake changed all that at first early in the quake's aftermath some geologists tried to explain the disaster by theorizing that massive plates had just rotated past one another counterclockwise but a handful of usgs scientists led by george plaffer knew that something else had happened something we'd never studied before klafker and his team went to alaska to study the land and what they found was weird in some areas forests had been submerged under salt water but in others rocks with barnacles on them were standing on dry land the land hadn't moved from side to side it had moved up we know it today as a megathrust earthquake when one plate slowly slides beneath another in a process known as subduction when the forces build up between these overlapping plates and one of them slips the result is enough energy to move an entire coastline once blafker and his team figured out what was going on they realized that the earth wasn't somehow growing in circumference like some geologists thought instead the plates were recycling themselves in these subduction zones as one plate slipped under another it was forced down into the magma where it returned to a molten state it turned out that the two plates involved in the alaska quake the pacific and the north american plates were the world's largest making up about a third of the world's surface and of course they're still colliding at a rate of about 5.8 centimeters per year with the lighter north american plate being pushed upward today we know that all of the earthquakes with a recorded magnitude of 9.0 or higher and there have been six of them since 1900 have been the result of one of these megathrust quakes but thankfully most earthquakes are not megathrusts the majority occur along those transform boundaries where plates slowly slide past each other it's this movement that will eventually cause los angeles which is situated on the pacific plate to slide right past san francisco which sits on the north american plate that will at least make commuting easier of course this part of the pacific plate moves about 50 millimeters to the northwest each year so that'll take a while and while earthquakes usually occur where tectonic plates meet they can also happen far from their edges because plate boundaries are just one type of fault or fracture in the crust faults can form just about anywhere on a plate as the result of a plate jostling around and bumping into other ones or sometimes helped along by things like local volcanic activity no matter what their origin the constant buildup and release of energy in these faults are what cause earthquakes far from plates boundaries so-called normal faults for example form where the crust is being pulled apart and the ground above the fault zone drops one of the largest normal faults in the u.s is the 240 kilometer long wasatch fault which extends through idaho and utah as the north american plate moves through the southwest it stretches and this area of crust pulls it apart forming the normal fault reverse faults meanwhile occur when the opposite occurs and pieces of crust are being compressed together so the ground above the fault zone is being pushed up these kind of faults are the earth's great mountain builders the sierra nevada the rocky mountains even the himalaya are all the result of reverse fault dynamics and it's also the type of fault that caused that mega thrust in alaska then we have strike slip faults where pieces of the earth rub against each other sideways california san andreas fault is probably the most well-known of this kind in north america while most of the earthquake activity in southwestern europe is the work of turkey's anatolian faults like many other aspects of earth science we're still trying to understand all of the forces that cause earthquakes and while the alaskan quake ushered in a new era of knowledge in terms of how the earth is pieced together scientists are still trying to get a handle on questions like how different temperatures within the earth affect seismic activity and then there's the big question of whether and how we can predict them it'd be nice if we could just monitor tectonic plates and send out warnings when a quake is imminent but those plates are usually about 100 kilometers thick and the process that occurs before an earthquake is subtle and pretty much impossible to observe but maybe the most lasting legacy of the 1964 earthquake is all of the scientific institutions that now exist to study and monitor the activity of the earth the us geological surveys earthquake hazards program the tsunami warning center and the advanced national seismic system which monitors seismic activity around the clock were all created in the wake of the alaska quake to get a grasp on all the science that's going on right beneath our feet and there's no shortage of data for them to study there are more than half a million detectable earthquakes around the world each year a hundred thousand of which can be felt by humans a hundred of which cause damage the more we learn the better scientists will become at predicting when and where earthquakes may strike so tectonic plates move in a ton of nuanced ways and sometimes it results in earthquakes and mountains but even with all of the variety and how the crust moves that's not the only way mountains grow some mountains get their start with smashing crust but then get taller through another mechanism erosion on scishow we've talked about all kinds of big complicated questions like what happened at the start of the universe but sometimes the questions that are hardest to answer are actually some of the simplest ones like take mountains mountains have a profound impact on the rainfall patterns that shape our weather and climate but how does rain affect mountain ranges it seems like an easy question but geologists have been debating the answer for more than a century and some of their ideas aren't what you'd expect like what if raindrops actually make mountains grow if it's true the implications could shape how we view the formation of the biggest features on our planet's surface and after decades of searching the final pieces of the puzzle are starting to emerge thanks to some radiation from space oddly enough the key to this idea is erosion the process of wind water or ice wearing down a mountain by carrying away small pieces of soil and rock and intuitively knocking off bits of a mountain ought to make it smaller and if erosion were the whole story that would pretty much be the end of it but that misses the complex effects of plate tectonics plate tectonics describes how earth's crust is broken into moving chunks but what matters here is what happens when those pieces come together when two plates collide their edges can get pushed up creating a mountain range and erosion can affect that process both while it's happening and long after it all comes down to erosion's ability to remove material from the mountains and thus wait see when mountains get lighter they act differently for instance during the slow collision between plates lighter plates will experience less friction as slabs of rocks slide past each other on their journey upwards and less friction means the tectonic forces have an easier time pushing the mountain upwards making a taller mountain then there's another factor called isostatic equilibrium that's the idea that the tectonic plates are essentially floating on the mantle and their height is the balance point between gravity pulling down and buoyancy pushing up just like how an empty boat sits higher in the water than a fully loaded one as mountains are eroded away and become lighter they can float higher so erosion can give an extra lift from below by accelerating the tectonic forces already in motion now it's worth acknowledging what might seem like an obvious problem with this even if erosion makes a mountain lighter it seems like wearing away the rock should also make the mountain shorter and here the key is that geologists think a lot of this erosion happens not on a mountain's peak but in river valleys lower down these are areas of intense erosion and by cutting into the side of a mountain they can remove a lot of weight without removing a lot of height so overall it seems straightforward rain creates rivers rivers erode mountains the mountains become lighter and ultimately taller except here's the problem all of this rests on that first idea that rain drives erosion through rivers but geologists have had an incredibly tough time proving that like there are a lot of things that provide water for rivers including rain underground aquifers and the seasonal melting of glaciers so to claim that rain is the primary driver of the erosion that might grow mountains someone needs to show that changes in rainfall actually correspond to changes in erosion and isolating those details has proven so difficult to do that it took until 2020 to do this in a tectonically active mountain range to do it a team looked at how rain affects rivers cutting into the earth's tallest mountains the himalayas and to measure the rate of erosion they relied on something kind of surprising cosmic rays from space cosmic rays are highly energetic particles that come from the sun and beyond and when they strike rock they can sometimes interact with the minerals inside to produce a form of the element beryllium called beryllium 10. but this only happens for rocks near the surface like during or after erosion so when you look at a sample of eroded rock the more beryllium 10 atoms you see in it the longer it's been since it was eroded out of a rock in the study researchers used that information to figure out how fast erosion was happening in himalayan river valleys in bhutan and nepal next they built computer simulations of the rivers themselves including their watersheds then they enter rainfall data into their river models to see if they could reproduce erosion rates that match what they observed using beryllium-10 and it worked erosion from their mottled rivers does in fact depend on how much rain falls in the area and somehow this is only one piece of the puzzle the next step is to link these findings with a model of the tectonic forces to quantify how strongly this erosion affects the height of a mountain but if scientists couldn't say with confidence that rain contributes strongly to the erosion effects of rivers the rest would be kind of a moot point so score one for finding the evidence needed to back up our hypotheses it's not always the most glamorous part of science but it's one of the most important for understanding our world even something as peaceful as rain can carve away at mountains and bring them to new heights but that's after the mountain emerged in the first place there are other mountains that didn't start out as the result of smashing crust at all the adirondacks likely had a slightly hotter origin story geology really loves its layers older stuff on the bottom newer stuff on top that is until this planet of ours cooks flips and smushes those rocks every which way sometimes super ancient rock just sort of bubbles up out of the ground to build an entire brand new mountain range such as new york's adirondack mountains see the rock on the high peaks of the adirondacks is pretty old and rare we're talking a billion years here yet the mountains themselves have only been around for 5 million years to put that into perspective multi-cellular life was only sort of a thing a billion years ago whereas 5 million years ago humans were probably splitting off from chimpanzees some of these particular rocks are also relatively uncommon at least here on earth they're called anorthocyte an igneous rock that is one formed from magma that's pretty common in the higher elevations of the adirondacks and is also found in samples from the moon anorthocyte forms deep underground where both the pressure and temperature are high and it requires some pretty extreme conditions like say two continental plates colliding which is what happened to create the grenville erogeny a mountain building event roughly a billion years ago that created a huge range that was as high as the himalayas and stretched from modern day canada all the way to mexico as part of that event anorthocyte got squeezed up from deep in the earth's mantle helping form these new mountains but as time marched on the grenvilles eroded and the igneous material became buried in sediment and around 400 to 500 million years ago the mountain range was replaced by a shallow ocean over time that seafloor accumulated new layers of sediment burying the remnants of the granvilles under more and more material but five million years ago something happened in that corner of new york to lift up that old rock forming a series of dome-shaped mountains and geologists are only starting to understand how because in this case no new continental plates came together it's more like upstate new york just decided to blow bubbles one afternoon in 2018 a study published in the journal geophysical research letters described two potential mechanisms for how the dome-shaped adirondacks might have bubbled up from below around a hundred kilometers below the surface of the adirondacks is a layer of low-density light rock compared to the stuff around it this rock is buoyant researchers think some of this material may have flowed upwards to fill cracks and expand eventually accumulating enough to push everything above it up and create a mountain another possibility is that heat may have played a role in expanding the rock and creating that same upward movement in fact the researchers think both mechanisms may have played a role regardless the process is still happening today with the adirondacks rising at a rate of 2-3 millimeters per year which adds up that's 30 centimeters in a century when the process started the old igneous rock was still hidden under that newer sediment but igneous rock is much harder than the sediments deposited at the bottom of the sea so over time the newer stuff eroded away revealing the original billion-year-old rock which is apparently how you upcycle a new mountain range out of an old one the newer rock hasn't eroded away completely and you can still find it around the edges of the mountains but the peaks are that crazy old anorthocyte and that means the super old rock of the grenvilles gets to ascend to brand new heights so heat expanded those rocks and help them merge into mountains but what if that never happened what would earth look like without mountains in an alternate universe earth could have been totally flat and just covered in water so here are some theories on how we avoided that fate and ended up with land as we know it earth has land you know that odds are pretty good that you're on some of it right now but here's a weird thing to think about it's possible that land didn't always exist and technically speaking it doesn't have to i mean if you were just to simply smooth out earth's crust the oceans contain enough water to cover the planet in a sea more than two kilometers deep so why does land exist why is it so varied with all those mountains and valleys and flat plains and here's a fun one could anything ever get rid of land on earth to answer those questions which god knows i want to do you need to travel back more than 4 billion years billions of years ago earth started as a cloud of dust and grains left over from the sun's formation then over time those pieces slowly balled together into proto-earth that ball was made of all kinds of elements and as it aged the denser ones like iron sank toward the center of the ball to become the earth's core while the lighter ones stayed toward the outside eventually the planet separated into the layers we know today the inner and outer core the gooey mantle and the crust these days there are two main kinds of crust continental and oceanic and they are made of different ingredients oceanic crust tends to be mostly a type of rock called basalt and contains more heavy compounds and continental crust which generally makes up land tends to be mostly granite and contains more relatively light compounds but the composition of the early crust and how it changed in earth's first billion years or so it's pretty hard to pin down like a lot of earth's early history we just don't have much or in some cases any physical evidence it's pretty much all been recycled and destroyed by now so there are a lot of interpretations but mostly models seem to start with a crust that would more resemble oceanic crust today with continental crust slowly growing over time the exact date when the first continental crust appeared is one of the big questions in geoscience some models say it started growing almost immediately others say it didn't really get going until about 3.6 billion years ago but there's something potentially really interesting hidden in there because depending on which of these models is right early earth might have been a water whirl we think the oceans had to have existed by around 3.8 billion years ago that's based on evidence like the ancient pillow lavas dated to around that time which only form when lava flows into water so if continental crust hadn't formed by then there would have been a point in time at which the earth was indeed an ocean world where land did not exist so like don't take land for granted we could all be fish as for why continental crust started forming there are a couple ideas one of the most well studied relies on the movement of tectonic plates the big slabs that make up earth's crust and it goes like this at some point the idea says the crust started to form into these giant plates possibly thanks to massive magma plumes from deep within the earth and as the plates started pushing against each other some of them began sliding down towards the mantle in a process called subduction and as that happened the increased heat near and in the mantle began to heat the rock but since rock isn't completely homogeneous it's not like it all melted at once instead different chemicals started to liquefy at different rates and the rock separated in a process known as partial melting with some of the areas being denser and others less dense over time this process repeated and we ended up with new oceanic crust and the first continental crust material that material was brought up through volcanic eruptions which then built up into small volcanic islands above the ocean the very first land peaking its little head above the water and as more volcanoes erupted and material got scraped off subducting plates these islands would have grown over time into larger continents of course like i said earlier studying the beginning of earth's history is hard so not all scientists agree that subduction was necessary to build the first continent like in 2012 one group proposed something a little more like oozy they got this idea while looking at rocks from the issue a green stone belt in greenland which are more than 3.5 billion years old they compared the amount of trace elements found in those rocks to amounts we'd expect to see if they formed by subduction and they concluded that this ancient crust may not have needed to get all the way down into the mantle via subduction to melt and reform instead it might have kind of oozed up as rocks melted higher up in the crust so no subduction zone needed no matter how this occurred though eventually earth did get its first continent based on various pieces of evidence some researchers have proposed that this continent which they call valbara was made of rocks that are today found in southern africa and australia while others favor er a landmass made up of what would today be parts of india madagascar and australia in any case land happened and as far as we can tell earth has had it ever since since the time of er and valbara plate tectonics and other forces have kept continents above water and made them even craggier these days new continental crust is still being formed and destroyed at subduction zones and plate collisions have also pushed up mountains like in the himalayas making the earth even less smooth meanwhile erosion and other processes have also played a part with wind and rain carving canyons arches and other amazing landscapes so no matter how it got here the land hasn't been unchanging and still it's continually shaped changed and even sometimes been destroyed or completely hidden by forces of nature and that makes you wonder if all these forces are still at play reshaping the landscape all the time well could those forces ever make land disappear well the good news is continental crust is usually fairly stable it's mostly the oceanic stuff that subducts and is recycled when plates collide and today the earth has reached more or less equilibrium between the amount of crust made and the amount of crust lost but some models have suggested that the amount of continental crust has actually decreased from some ancient peak and a 2016 paper suggested that when india hit asia a substantial portion of the continental crust like half of it ended up being forced down into the mantle like oh bye-bye land like there you go so it is possible to destroy continental crust on a large scale but even then land will probably never disappear entirely like i said earth seems to have reached a sort of equilibrium between crust made and crust loss and we also have plate tectonics working to push parts of the ground higher and higher above sea level all the time so even if some sort of catastrophic flooding happened that wouldn't be the end of dry land even if plate tectonics stopped altogether which for the record is really unlikely since plate tectonics is powered by heat from the earth's core and that's not cooling down anytime soon earth still wouldn't become perfectly spherical scientists at caltech noted that while erosion might wear the mountains down into hills there would still be other processes things like meteorite impacts would still happen which could create large dents in earth's surface little rings of land that would still stick out above the water volcanoes would still exist too because although many are powered by magma from those all-important subduction zones they can also exist far away from plate edges like the hot spot under hawaii in those places you don't need a subduction zone instead magma plumes in the mantle are hot enough to melt their way up through the crust in fact while earth is the only planet with active tectonic plates volcanoes like this have created land on other worlds too like even though it's dry now mars used to have a huge ocean but it still had dry land in part thanks to things like olympus mons its gigantic now extinct volcano so even if earth was a water world billions of years ago the odds of that happening again are pretty slim which is great news because while we probably haven't always had land as we know it the fact that it does exist well has basically shaped everything about our species and also millions of others and combined with the awesome forces of plate tectonics erosion and other geology processes we've ended up with the vast and beautiful array of geography that we have today so it could have been magma plumes volcanic islands or oozy melty rocks overall heat seems to be a big player in mountain formation but a lot of it comes down to pieces of earth's crust hitting each other and even pieces of rock from space hitting earth and if you're thinking that earth can't be the only planet with space rock made mountains you'd be right here are some of the others when scientists try to understand the geology of the solar system one of their most powerful tools is earth our planet shares a lot with some of our neighbors from our atmosphere up top all the way down to the spinning core sometimes though astronomers find things that don't look like anything here at home places that couldn't even exist on earth and over the years we've discovered some very unusual mountains take riya sylvia a gigantic mountain on vesta the second biggest object in the asteroid belt what makes riya silvia so impressive isn't just how tall it is but how tall it is relative to everything else at about 22 kilometers high it's nearly three times the height of mount everest even though vesta is only 500 kilometers across that would be like a mountain 250 kilometers high here on earth tall enough to put you well into space ria sylvia is more than just a mountain it's also an impact crater which might sound kind of strange since we don't normally think of holes making mountains but the process of an asteroid slamming into the surface is so powerful that the ground briefly acts like a liquid and splashes back up like a droplet of water falling into a pond as everything cools down that splash solidifies into a mountain called the central uplift this process happens for basically every crater above a certain size and we do have the remnants of some here on earth the impact that formed rhea sylvia though must have been astonishingly powerful scientists think its remnants became some of the most commonly found types of meteorites a central uplift isn't the only way an impact can form a mountain mercury is home to one of the solar system's most mysterious mountain ranges and for decades astronomers have thought it might be the result of an impact but on the other side of the planet this area doesn't have an official name and it's a far cry from the peak of riya sylvia the tops of these hills only rise from about 0.8 to 1.8 kilometers above the surface what's more impressive is what's on the planet's far side caloris planitia an impact crater so large you could put three vestas inside it with room to spare this is the site of one of the solar system's most violent collisions and its effects were global when planetary scientists assembled the first surface maps of mercury in the 1970s they noticed something weird these strange low hills weren't just on the other side of the planet from coloris planitia they were exactly opposite at what's called the antipodal point it's too perfect to be a coincidence the impact must have created the mountain range through the planet as impossible as that sounds it probably happened because of mercury's geometry mercury is a virtually perfect sphere unlike earth whose fast rotation makes it fatter at the equator and shorter at the poles when the caloris impact occurred it sent massive shock waves through the planet because the path to the other side is the same distance in every direction these waves converged at the antipode their combined strength deformed mercury's surface and created the mountains it's also possible that with less gravity and no atmosphere material ejected from the crater traveled halfway around the planet to land on the far side between the shock waves and all that flying debris mercury ended up with one of the solar system's most intriguing spots another is found at the other end of the solar system way out on freezing pluto there at the edge of its icy heart lies a peak no taller than the rocky mountains but much much cooler like figuratively and literally it's named right mons after the brothers of airplane fame and it's one of the best candidates for a cryovolcano these volcanoes aren't too different from the ones you're familiar with except for what makes up their lava pluto's crust is made of water ice but in the seriously cold temperatures at the outer solar system that ice has many of the same properties as rock here on earth so it only makes sense that a volcano on pluto would have lava made of liquid water instead of liquid rock scientists aren't certain that right mons or a nearby mountain that's also a candidate are cryo volcanoes and will probably be a long time before we get more observations of far-off pluto but cryo-volcanoes do seem to be a thing in the solar system there's potential evidence for them on saturn's moon titan and on the asteroid series it's not yet clear how they're possible in some of these places and that's what makes them so interesting every mountain reveals the history of the area around it even if you can't see that history directly and in space that's a tool for learning about some seriously weird geology that we might never have known existed otherwise and that's how to grow a mountain they're definitely not one size fits all so it might not be that surprising that they can form and grow in a variety of ways thank you for watching this episode and thanks to our patrons for helping to make it possible if you want to join our amazing community of patrons and help support scishow check out patreon.com scishow [Music] you

Channel: SciShow

Views: 1,079,296

Keywords: education, learn, Mountains, compilation, The Amazing Life Cycle of Mountains, learn about mountains, geology, study mountains, how mountains are created, space mountains, underwater mountains, big mountains, biggest mountains on earth, Scishow mountains, Scishow planet, Scishow, Hank Green, Michael Aranda, Stefan Chin, life cycle of mountains, facts about earth, earth as water world, why isn't earth under water, under sea mountains, islands, islands and mountains

Id: CW8l_VPgEgI

Length: 34min 22sec (2062 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021