Scientists Discover 'Supermountains' That Stretched 4,500 Miles

[Judi Lynn]

Orlando Jenkinson - Yesterday 7:46 AM

Prehistoric "supermountains" that stretched around 4,500 miles and dwarfed the modern-day Himalayas has been discovered by scientists.

Their research, published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, reveals a previously unknown mountain range named the Nuna Supermountains, which existed on a vast ancient continent between two and 1.8 billion years ago. They also describe a second vast mountain range, which arose between 650 and 500 million years ago and is named the Transgondwanan Supermountain.

The findings shed light on two periods of Earth's ancient history, when supercontinents made the surface of the planet look very different to the spread of continents we see today.

The Transgondwanan Supermountain was found on Gondwana, a vast ancient continent that combined the land masses of Antarctica, Africa, South America, Australasia and India and existed between 600 million and 180 million years ago. Its break-up led eventually to the formation of the continents we are familiar with today.

More:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/scientists-discover-supermountains-that-stretched-4-500-miles/ar-AATyXia?ocid=hponeservicefeed

[RockRaven]

1. "Transgondwanan Supermountain" is definitely one of those "sounds like an XXXX band name"

things...

[left-of-center2012]

2. How do they know that these mountains existed ?

They talk about them in the linked article but I didn't see the evidence for them.

Did I miss something ?

What tells us that they existed ?

[teach1st]

3. Here is a related paper from 2005/2006

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012821X0600536X

The explosive radiation of animals on Earth during the late Early Cambrian period (? 530–510 Ma) coincides with the deposition of enormous volumes of continentally derived sedimentary rocks throughout Gondwana. We show here, that these quartz-rich sedimentary units, collected from five continents, display remarkably similar detrital-zircon U–Pb age-patterns and propose that they were sourced from either side of a > 8000-km-long and generally > 1000-km-wide mountain chain (the Transgondwanan Supermountain)...