Why Are Mountains So High? Mysterious Anomaly Exposes Limits of Theory

I theorize that there are two factors: First glaciers are efficient at gnawing at mountains, and second rock is brittle therefore mountains tend to set in the timespans of millenia even if there are no landslides. The second one might be the one that is unpredictable.

In Switzerland there's a tiny town, Brinzauls, which is setting as a whole together with the slope it sits on about three or six feet a year, because in the depth of a few hundred feet there's water flowing through the cracks of the bedrock. There are plans to bore a tunnel along the water-carrying stratum to drain it to stop the movement downwards.

This is just an example of one of the many things that might happen to crop down mountains.

The setting movement is unpredictable because it also depends on the climate. In oceanic climates water could quite literally be dissolving mountains from below.

It would be really interesting to feed a csv with all of the various attributes into an ML algorithm and see if there are any statistical patterns.

I bet a lot of the 'noise' could be accounted for by the meteorology of the surrounding area. It's interesting that all of the worlds highest peaks are fairly close to the equator. Of course, they are all in the same mountain range, which leaves more variables to rule out.

When the mountain is both tall & too steep, it quickly crumbles. This sets something of an upper limit on how tall the mountain can be.

Indeed, many of the world's tallest mountains are more massive than they are steep.

For extra credit, here's another competing theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_buzzsaw

In short, glaciation & associated erosion grows significantly more aggressive with altitude, creating a sort of asymptotic limit to the height of a mountain.

"The researchers looked at samples from a big number of mountain landscapes [...], comparing their rock types and climate conditions. They found that once mountains pass a specific height, the channels [they mean the area between mountain peaks/ridgelines, basically the path e.g. a glacier "rides" on] become very sensitive to even the smallest changes in their steepness, and that limits the heights of the mountains around them. After adding more data from hundreds of mountain ranges, they could confirm this pattern, that mountain height is limited once its channel's steepness crosses a certain value."

Not sure if I understood "mountain channel" correctly, I don't know much about geology, please correct me if I'm wrong.

EDIT: Think I got "channel" correct though, there's e.g. the English Channel, if you imagine it without water, England and France could be seen like mountains.

Probably not correct since the earth is pear shaped not spherical, and the size of mountains are quite small relative to the earth's curvature. However from the article erosion of mountains seems to be impacted by water, limiting height, so on a smaller similar planet by material and water composition it would stand to reason that force of water given the same mass would be less so perhaps mountains would erode more slowly relative to continental drift and therefore be higher.

Yes, mountains and continents sink into the mantle due to their weight.

Although I can't access the paywalled article, I believe they show it's related to "channel steepness", which is caused by river erosion - perhaps implying mountains could be higher where there are no rivers?

They can have caves and such. Granite and I believe also sandstone tends to be totally solid, but limestone tends to form extensive cave networks from water seeping through the rock. Basalt can also have caves from anciet magma chambers but I don't think those usually lend themselves to human exploration.

> folks from the Electric Universe paradigm have an alternative model

Sigh. Go on then. Don't tell us it exists, provide a link.