Mountains can’t be created without lubricant, and 2 billion years ago that lubricant was graphite produced by the carbon broken down from layers of dead plankton on the ocean floor.
Dams built in an earlier age are suddenly vulnerable as the climate shifts.
Snow melts near the Continental Divide in the Bridger Wilderness Area in Wyoming, part of the Greater Yellowstone Area.
Bryan Shuman/University of Wyoming
The area’s iconic national parks are home to grizzlies, elk and mountain snowfall that feeds some of the country’s most important rivers. A new report show the changes underway as temperatures rise.
Colorado’s East Troublesome Fire jumped the Continental Divide on Oct. 22, 2020, and eventually became Colorado’s second-largest fire on record.
Lauren Dauphin/NASA Earth Observatory
Scientists studied charcoal layers in the sediment of lake beds across the Rockies to track fires over time. They found increasing fire activity as the climate warmed.
Heat and dryness are leaving high mountain areas more vulnerable to forest fires.
David McNew/Getty Images
Everest didn’t become the highest mountain overnight. This process was excruciatingly slow; a result of complex interactions between the solid earth, the atmosphere and the biosphere.
Creeping avens – a plant native to mountains in Central Asia and Europe.
Losapio/Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
We think of mountains as remote and little affected by human activity. Unfortunately, the negative impacts of what we do has important implications for nature, wildlife and human society.
Stocking the haypile.
Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Pikas – small cousins of rabbits – live mainly in the mountainous US west. They’ve been called a climate change poster species, but they’re more adaptable than many people think.
The Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia. The sheer number of seracs gives the impression that the glacier’s surface is covered in dragon scales.
Olivier Dangles/IRD
Olivier Dangles, Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD)
The parable of the dragons underlines the need to apprehend glacier disappearance in a transdisciplinary way, to create a dialogue between the physical, ecological and philosophical sciences.
Early humans called Denisovans lived in a remote mountain cave between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, and possibly longer still, raising intriguing questions about their relationship to modern humans.
Himalayan rocks hold magnetic clues about their origins.
Craig Robert Martin
Earth’s magnetic field locks information into lava as it cools into rock. Millions of years later, scientists can decipher this magnetic data to build geologic timelines and maps.
Montse Barado, casa Armengol (Sorpe). In summer, once a week, cattle ranchers and shepherds climb to the communal lands to have a look at the animals and give them some salt.
David Tarrasón i Cerdá,
Federica Ravera, Universitat de Vic – Universitat Central de Catalunya
In the Catalan Pyrenees, women shepherds and cattle ranchers try to valorise the ancestral agropastoral culture to save the mountains from climate change.
Rocks contain a layer-by-layer record of the history of our planet.
Fred Moore/flickr
Professor for Conservation Biology, Axa Chair for Functional Mountain Ecology at the École Nationale Supérieure Agronomique de Toulouse, Université de Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier