Pushed up by the crumpling of the Earth’s crust following the collision of tectonic plates, mountains could in theory keep rising almost indefinitely. In practice, they do not
Jérome Lavé, a geologist at the University of Lorraine, describes another, much more spectacular mechanism. Dr Lavé has collected evidence suggesting that, in around 1190, an enormous landslide slashed perhaps 500 metres from the height of Annapurna IV, a mountain in the Himalayas that stands about 7,500 metres high today. If he is right, it would be one of the biggest landslips ever recorded.
Dr Lavé’s suspicions were aroused while doing fieldwork in the Ganga plain in Nepal in 2012. He noticed that the ground beneath his feet had an unusual composition. A 50-metre core drilled out of the rock showed an average concentration of limestone of around 10%. But for one 4-metre stretch the concentration rose to nearly 50%, “which is enormous, and completely abnormal”, he says.
Back home, he sent samples from the rubble field, the rock core and others from the path the landslide might have taken for dating. Should their ages roughly correspond, that would suggest they were linked to the same event. By measuring the abundance of chlorine-36 , and carbon-14 , his colleagues dated the samples to the late 12th century, and to within a couple of decades of each other. That is within the accuracy limits of the dating techniques themselves.
The problem with that theory, says Dr Rowan, is that there are some peaks that manage to escape the erosive effect of glaciers, and then grow so steeply that glaciers can no longer stick to their sides. “The question is,” she asks, “what stops these mountains getting bigger?”
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