New Delhi: Mount Everest is Earth's highest mountain above sea level with a towering height of 8,848 meters. But it is interesting to note that there were ranges that stretched across the continent.
These 'super-mountains' were longer than the Himalayas and it is believed that they played a crucial role in the evolution of our planet. The formation of these humongous mountains has been tracked by researchers throughout the history of Earth.
These mountains were so huge that they were nearly four times the length of the present-day Himalayan ranges (2,300 kilometres) and they stretched up to 8,000 kilometres across.
They have been formed twice in Earth's history - the first was between 2,000 and 1800 million years ago and the second was between 650 and 500 million years ago.
Researchers are of the view that there are links between these two instances of super-mountains and the two most important periods of evolution in the history of this planet.
In order to identify these formations, researchers had used traces of zircon with low lutetium content - a combination of minerals and rare earth elements found only in the roots of high mountains where they form under intense pressure, in a study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
Ziyi Zhu, a PhD candidate at the Australian National University, has said that there is no evidence of other super-mountains forming at any stage between these two events, which makes them even more significant.
The first super-mountains are being called Nuna Supermountain, which coincides with the likely appearance of eukaryotes, organisms that later gave rise to plants and animals.
The second ones are called Transgondwanan Super-mountain and it coincides with the appearance of the first large animals and the Cambrian explosion 45 million years later when most animal groups appeared in the fossil record.
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