The Himalayas are a young mountain range. At some point millions of year ago there would have been a different highest point on earth. What was it?
How could anyone possibly know which mountain was highest a few million years ago?
Hey, this is the Straight Dope! Amazing things happen.
Why couldn’t they? There are models of erosion. There are models of uplift and tectonics. We know what the planet looked at many millions of years ago. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if some bored geology grad student looked into this.
Nevermind, didn’t read the link first.
My first guess would be K2.
Since this is the SD and we like to nit pick and be “technically correct” (the best kind of correct). Everest is the highest range not the tallest
You might be interested in this previous thread about the once might Appalachian mountains of the Eastern U.S. plus some other relevant info.
The Central Pangean Mountains (today the Appalachians, parts of the British Isles, and the Anti-Atlas Mountains) were formed in much the same way as the Himalayas, and likely reached similar heights. Finding a particular peak would be fairly difficult, though I suppose guesses might be made from one of the higher peaks in that range.
I seem to recall hearing about some theory on the approximate maximum height of Earth’s mountains. It was based on gravity and the amount of atmosphere, and suggested that mountains could not be much higher than the Himalaya or similar. I think it was aimed at explaining why Olympus Mons on Mars is so much higher than anything on Earth.
There was probably some time at which the highest point was somewhere in the Appalachians, but that might not have been the immediate predecessor to the Himalayas. How old are the Andes, or the Rockies?
The Rockies at various points would have given the Himalayas a run for their money. To get really high topography, you need continent-continent collision. Since the pull of subducting slabs of oceanic crust is the main driver of continental drift, it’s unusual to have a configuration of plates that allows for a sustained continent-continent collision. In the case of the Rockies, the plate that was subducting under the western edge of North America was mostly oceanic, but there were a series of Japan or Philippines-sized island arcs that were pushed into the western edge of North America. That meant that at least at some points, when they were actively uplifting the Rockies would have been higher than a simply oceanic-continental mountain belt like the Cascades or Andes.
Active mountain building ended in the Rockies right about at the same time as India was just starting to collide with Asia. It could be that they were like ships in the night, with the Rockies eroding while the Himalayas rose and eventually took the high altitude crown. Although younger upstart mountains like the Andes or the Cascades (which used to be much more Andes-like) could have had a few million years in the limelight before things really got going in the Himalayas.
No particular reason to think so, since it’s also part of the Himalayas.
In general, the Andes are younger than the Himalayas, and the Himalayas younger than the Rockies. But the tectonic collisions that produced the first two are still ongoing and continuing to cause those ranges to rise, while the Rockies are being uplifted very little if at all.
You can deduce a maximum height based on the strength of rocks. Eventually the weight will be great enough to cause the rocks to flow. In fact you can do a first principles estimate just based on the strength of the electromagnetic repulsion of electrons and atomic nuclei that comes close to predicting the height of Mt. Everest. The atmosphere doesn’t enter into it as long as you assume the mountains grow fast enough to ignore erosion. This was a favorite back-of-the-envelope problem of Victor Weisskopf’s.
I found a cite for Vicky Weisskopf’s back-of-the-envelope:
A couple of observations:
There are geological (as opposed to strict physical) reasons for presuming that the tallest mountain will be a shield volcano, as opposed to a fold or fault-block mountain, located over a particularly slow-moving mantle hot spot. (Examples of such spots would include Hawai’i, Yellowstone, Mauritius.) This does not nail anything down, because at any particular moment of geologic time, the highest mountain might be a fold or fault excrescence upthrust higher than the present highest shield mountain (as is the case today, where Mauna Kea is twice as tall as Everest but only about 40% of its height.) But long-range it provides a useful guide to the likely ultimate answer.
I cannot prove the accuracy of the following, but Julian May, who set a four-novel series in the Pliocene (~5 mya), was, despite lading it with SF and Jungian tropes. careful to keep her geography as factual as possible. Thus the site of Paris is a swamp (as was geologically the case), the Armorican Massif (Brittany) is an island, volcanoes occur where they were geologically attested, the dry Mediterranean basin has the proper hypersaline lagoons and salt deserts in the proper places, etc. And she has a mountain climber attempting the highest mountain in her world, Monte Rosa in the French Alps (presently second highest Alpine peak). I suspect strongly she dug up accurate evidence pointing to Monte Rosa before choosing it.
This is exactly what Olympus Mons is-- a Hawaii-style shield volcano that doesn’t move because plate tectonics is shut down on Mars. The trouble with huge shield volcanoes on Earth is that with the composition of the crust and mantle, by the time they get really super-huge the volcanism will change to a mode that doesn’t make shield volcanoes. That’s exactly the case in Iceland, which is a hotspot like Hawaii, but is stationary because it’s on a plate boundary. As the magma recycles and differentiates, you start to get volcanoes more of the air-traffic snarling Mt. Unpronounceable as opposed to the runny effusive eruptions that form shield volcanoes.
The trouble with this is that the modern Alps aren’t that much older than the Himalayas. At a mere 5 mya the high point would almost certainly still be in the Himalayas.
I read an interview with Julian May where she makes clear that although everything she mentions is real at some point in time, she has fudged quite a few dates to fit the storyline. Ramapitchecus is 8 million years old but she has them around in the Pliocene, date of the Mediterranean filling is not right, date of the Ries crater is not right etc etc.
So maybe she’s right that Monte Rosa was the highest peak at some point but she collapsed the timeline to make it at 5 million years for the sake of the story.
Off by half an order of magnitude…
Disregard this post.
My original thought upon reading the thread title “What was the tallest mountain prior to Everest?” was: which mountain held the record before Everest was “discovered”?
My answer was going to be that even though not discovered Everest was still the highest mountain on the planet.
Exactly my thought… so much variables with everything moving about… Height?