Mumbai, December 29: Earth’s terrain does not stay the same for long. They are slowly changing. This is why today’s geography is so different from geography thousands of years old. Once all continents were part of a larger continent, today’s Himalayas were once part of the ocean. But today it is the highest mountain in the world. A new mountain range is expected to be higher than the Himalayas 200 million years from now, according to research. Researchers have found in their study that the mountain ranges in present-day Somalia are similar to those in the earlier Himalayas.
Create as before
Tectonic movements play a major role in the formation and transformation of the earth’s crust. In this, tectonic plates collide with each other to form Himalayan mountain ranges. Geologist Dr. Researchers at the University of Utrecht, led by Dow van Hinsberfen, have discovered that just as the Himalayan mountain ranges have formed, so have the Somali mountain ranges.
Reconstruction of ancient geography
An article published in Conversation details this change. Reconstruction of this type of archeology involves the study of tectonic plates, volcanoes, and other mountain formation processes, as well as their interactions with the oceans, the sun, and the atmosphere.
Use of software
Over the last 10 years, software has been developed that is capable of redesigning in this way. With the help of this software the geographical movements of the past can be understood and the future situation can be predicted. This suggests that large ocean currents change when very small pathways are opened in the oceans. As had been opened between the two American continents.
Geological record help
Today, 70 percent of the Earth’s crust is the same as it was 15-20 million years ago. At that time dinosaurs were already roaming the earth, whose remains have reached the earth’s surface today. However, information of all kinds of geological events was also buried during this period. Through this information, researchers tried to gather ancient geographical information.
How to collect information?
Many not-so-famous mountains, such as the Himalayas, are formed by the erosion and bending of rocks in broken tectonic plates. The minerals and fossils that have accumulated in them can reveal how these rocks formed. Geologists can collect these clues to find out what kind of relationship there is between continents and volcanoes.
Will Somalia be different from Africa?
Researchers have created a manual in which the geography of mountains can be explored based on the features found in mountain ranges. This makes it possible to predict the condition of those mountains over the next 200 million years. From this he understood that at that time the land of Somalia could be separated from Africa and come closer to India.
The mountain range that will form from this 200 million years later will be the Somali range and the Himalayan range of that time. Researchers say that Madagascar and the Gulf of Africa could form a mountain belt that would be extremely curved like the Carpathians in Eastern Europe or the Banda Islands of Indonesia and Timor, while Northwest India would be buried 50 kilometers below Somalia. This will make India curved and look like western Norway.