Recent Rapid Uplift of Today’s Mountains

An ongoing enigma for the standard geological community is why all the high mountain ranges of the world—including the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes, and the Rockies—experienced most of the uplift to their present elevations in what amounts to a blink of the eye, relative to the standard geological time scale. In terms of this time scale, these mountain ranges have all undergone several kilometers of vertical uplift since the beginning of the Pliocene about five million years ago. This presents a profound difficulty for uniformitarian thinking because the driving forces responsible for mountain building are assumed to have been operating steadily at roughly the same slow rates as observed in today's world for at least the past several hundred million years. But the uplift history of today's mountains is anything but uniformitarian in character. Observational evidence indicates that the terrain where these mountains now exist, in many if not most cases, was nearly flat and near sea level when the recent intense pulse of uplift began. The expectation of uniformitarian thinking generally is that most of the time denudation by erosion ought to be more or less in equilibrium with uplift. This lack of agreement between field observation and uniformitarian expectation has led to conflict among specialists in the ranks of the larger earth science community. Theorists who address these matters, confident that their uniformitarian models are sound, tend to ignore the observational reports or reinterpret them as much as they can to match the predictions of their theories. Geomorphologists who focus on this topic, on the other hand, confident their observations correspond to reality, tend to dismiss the explanations of the theorists as hopelessly out of touch with the real world. However, because of the specialization that typifies most of science today, a sizable fraction of the earth science community is largely oblivious that the uplift history of today's mountains is even an issue at all. This disconnect between the uniformitarian theorists and uniformitarian observationalists on the issue of mountains is nicely documented in a recent book