How To Describe A Mountain

Summary

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mountain, landform that rises prominently higher up its surround, mostly exhibiting steep slopes, a relatively confined summit area, and considerable local relief. Mountains by and large are understood to be larger than hills, simply the term has no standardized geological meaning. Very rarely do mountains occur individually. In about cases, they are plant in elongated ranges or chains. When an array of such ranges is linked together, information technology constitutes a mountain belt. For a listing of selected mountains of the globe, see below.

A mountain belt is many tens to hundreds of kilometres wide and hundreds to thousands of kilometres long. It stands above the surrounding surface, which may be a coastal plain, every bit along the western Andes in northern Chile, or a high plateau, as within and along the Plateau of Tibet in southwest China. Mount ranges or chains extend tens to hundreds of kilometres in length. Individual mountains are connected by ridges and separated past valleys. Within many mountain belts are plateaus, which stand loftier but contain little relief. Thus, for example, the Andes establish a mountain belt that borders the entire westward coast of Due south America; within it are both individual ranges, such equally the Cordillera Blanca in which lies Republic of peru's highest pinnacle, Huascarán, and the high plateau, the Altiplano, in southern Republic of peru and western Bolivia.

Geomorphic characteristics

Mountainous terrains take certain unifying characteristics. Such terrains accept higher elevations than do surrounding areas. Moreover, high relief exists within mountain belts and ranges. Individual mountains, mountain ranges, and mountain belts that have been created by different tectonic processes, even so, are often characterized by unlike features.

Chains of active volcanoes, such as those occurring at island arcs, are commonly marked by private high mountains separated past big expanses of low and gentle topography. In some bondage, namely those associated with "hot spots" (run across beneath), but the volcanoes at one end of the concatenation are active. Thus, those volcanoes stand high, merely with increasing distance away from them erosion has reduced the sizes of volcanic structures to an increasing degree.

Blue Ridge Mountains. Blue Ridge Parkway. Autumn in the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina, United States. Appalachian Highlands, Ridge and Valley, The Appalachian Mountain system

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The folding of layers of sedimentary rocks with thicknesses of hundreds of metres to a few kilometres often leaves long parallel ridges and valleys termed fold belts, every bit, for example, in the Valley and Ridge province of Pennsylvania in the eastern United States. The more resistant rocks form ridges, and the valleys are underlain by weaker ones. These fold belts commonly include segments where layers of older rocks have been thrust or pushed upwardly and over younger rocks. Such segments are known equally fold and thrust belts. Typically their topography is not as regular every bit where folding is the well-nigh of import procedure, simply it is usually dominated by parallel ridges of resistant rock divided by valleys of weaker rock, as in the eastern flank of the Canadian Rocky Mountains or in the Jura Mountains of French republic and Switzerland.

Near fold and thrust belts are bounded on one side, or lie parallel to, a chugalug or terrain of crystalline rocks. These are metamorphic and igneous rocks that in near cases solidified at depths of several kilometres or more and that are more resistant to erosion than the sedimentary rocks deposited on top of them. These crystalline terrains typically contain the highest peaks in whatsoever mountain belt and include the highest belt in the world, the Himalayas, which was formed by the thrusting of crystalline rocks up onto the surface of the Earth. The great heights exist considering of the resistance of the rocks to erosion and because the rates of continuing uplift are the highest in these areas. The topography rarely is as regularly oriented as in fold and thrust belts.

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In certain areas, blocks or isolated masses of rock have been elevated relative to next areas to form block-fault mountains or ranges. In some places, block-mistake ranges with an overall mutual orientation coalesce to define a mount belt or chain, but in others the ranges may be isolated.

Block faulting can occur when blocks are thrust, or pushed, over neighbouring valleys, every bit has occurred in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah in the western United States or as is at present occurring in the Tien Shan, an eastward–w range in western China and Central Asia. Within individual ranges, which are usually a few hundred kilometres long and several tens of kilometres wide, crystalline rocks commonly ingather out. On a large calibration, there is a clear orientation of such ranges, just inside them the landforms are controlled more than by the variations in erosion than by tectonic processes.

Block faulting also occurs where blocks are pulled apart, causing a subsidence of the intervening valley between diverging blocks. In this instance, alternating basins and ranges form. The basins eventually fill with sediment, and the ranges—typically tens of kilometres long and from a few to 20–thirty kilometres wide—often tilt, with steep relief on one side and a gentle slope on the other. The uniformity of the gently tilted slope owes its existence to long periods of erosion and degradation before tilting, sometimes with a capping of resistant lava flows on this surface prior to tilting and faulting. Both the Tetons of Wyoming and the Sierra Nevada of California were formed by blocks existence tilted up toward the eastward; major faults allowed the blocks on their east sides to drop steeply downwards several thousand metres and thereby created steep eastern slopes.

In some areas, a unmarried cake or a narrow zone of blocks has subsided between neighbouring blocks or plateaus that moved apart to form a rift valley between them. Mountains with steep inwards slopes and gentle outward slopes often form on the margins of rift valleys. Less usually, large areas that are pulled apart and subside get out between them an elevated block with steep slopes on both sides. An example of this kind of construction, chosen a horst, is the Ruwenzori in East Africa.

Finally, in certain areas, including those that one time were plateaus or broad uplifted regions, erosion has left what are known equally residual mountains. Many such mountains are isolated and not part of any discernible concatenation, as, for instance, Mountain Katahdin in Maine in the northeastern United states. Some unabridged chains (e.chiliad., the Appalachians in North America or the Urals in Russia), which were formed hundreds of millions of years agone, remain in spite of a long history of erosion. Most residual bondage and private mountains are characterized by low elevations; however, both gentle and precipitous relief can exist, depending on the caste of recent erosion.