Plate movement:
The dynamic Earth we live on is constantly in motion. We may not feel it everyday, but there are events when all people come to understand the power of plate tectonics: earthquakes. No California native can deny the strength of Mother Earth once he has experienced an earthquake that brought down entire sections of a freeway, or smushed parking structures as if they were made of playdough. More significant, however, are the plate movements that are pulling San Francisco and Los Angeles together. A phenomenon that we hear about in elementary school and never see results of as adults, it is difficult to imagine huge plates of rock sliding past each other and even more difficult to visualize them slamming into one another. But this is exactly what happened when the Himalayas were formed. The fusion of tectonic plates caused an upsurge of land that later became known as the Himalayan Plateau. This event had cooling effects on climate, and thus is another cause of dramatic climate change.
The sudden upsurge of the Himalayas caused increased erosion, which pulled carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere because to breakdown major land formations, a combination of acid and CO2 forms from the compounds in the air. Reduced levels of CO2 would cause planetary cooling by allowing heat to leave the earth. Today, carbon dioxide absorbs long-wave radiation to keep the atmosphere warm, and with smaller amounts of CO2 the atmosphere becomes cooler, allowing the climate to prepare for a period of extreme cooling (John, 1977). In fact, the rapid rising of the Himalayas is considered to one of the causes of the ice ages. Acid and other decaying compounds immediately begin to break down such land masses and "erosion on [large mountains] could reduce carbon dioxide levels enough to give the ice ages a push" (Watson, 1997). Because of the upsurge of this enormous mountain range, erosion would have been suddenly necessary over a large area. This erosion could remove huge amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, thus creating a reverse "greenhouse effect" and cooling the atmosphere and eventually the planet. |
