Never came across the thought, How mountains are formed??

We love climbing mountains, hiking through the mountains, and even just looking at them. But never have you thought how are they formed????

well, lets start by knowing what mountains are actually made of.

Mountains are made of the same stuff that we are all standing on right now, the hard rocky layer of the Earths surface, called the Crust. To be simple, The crust is a crispy, crunchy part/layer of the Earth.

The dirt, the rocks and all of the land on the planet are parts of the Crust. And it covers the whole Earth, even the Land that’s under water.

To be brief and clear, Earth’s crust is kind of like bread crust i.e., it covers everything in the same way that bread crust covers the whole loaf. But, unlike the bread crust, the Earth’s crust isn’t all in one piece. It’s broken up into pieces called plates, which covers the Earth like a giant Jigsaw puzzle.

These plates are huge and heavy but they don’t just sit there. In fact they are always moving. They move very slowly, just a tiny bit at a time, about few centimeters a year. But over a long periods of time, all of that moving around can add up to some big changes. Some times two of the plates in the Earth’s crust will move towards each other, and when they do they start to press against one another. But they have nowhere to go. So, they will just push against each other until they start to crumple. Then the rocks that make up the plates are pushed up over and over each other. The more they push together, the more the land rises and after a while, you will see a big thing, which we call a mountain.

Since, the plates are so huge, when they push up against each other, they don’t just make one mountain, they can makeup a whole mountain range, like The Alps in the Europe, The Andes in South America, The Appalachians in The United States were all made this way- by two plates of Earth’s crust slowly crashing into each other. Because of the slow movement of plates, it takes really long time for this mountains to form. long time in the sense millions and millions of years. That’s the reason why we can still see and even hear in news that the length of the mountains increased by some inches and are still growing.

Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth, grows about 4 millimeters every year. Do you know the reason? It’s because, the 2 plates that make up the land in the part of the world are still slowly smashing each other(Eurasian plate and Indian plate).

So, the plates of Earth’s crust are always in motion, which means that a long time ago, the mountains we see today weren’t there at all! and the Earth will definitely will look different in the future too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But takes a bit more time than we expect.