{"id":631875,"date":"2026-09-21T23:22:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T23:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/631875\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T23:22:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T23:22:18","slug":"ancient-himalayan-scale-mountains-in-antarctica-may-have-helped-gondwana-set-off-the-explosion-of-animal-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/631875\/","title":{"rendered":"Ancient Himalayan-scale Mountains in Antarctica May Have Helped Gondwana Set Off the Explosion of Animal Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"-3\"<\/a>Credit: Unsplash.<\/p>\n

Long before Antarctica froze over, parts of the continent may have risen into mountains on the scale of the Himalayas. Sure, the peaks are long gone now, but their roots, geologists argue, may still be entombed beneath kilometers of ice.<\/p>\n

A new study in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters<\/a> uses zircon crystals washed off Antarctica to reconstruct this now vanished landscape. What\u2019s more, the researchers propose that this vast mountain network created as the supercontinent Gondwana assembled between roughly 650 million and 450 million years ago did more than reshape continents. Its erosion may have fertilized the oceans, buried enormous quantities of carbon-rich sediment and helped create conditions for the Cambrian explosion, when a wide variety of animals burst onto the evolutionary scene around 530 million years ago. <\/p>\n

Tiny crystals from a lost mountain world<\/p>\n

More than 99.5 percent of Antarctica is hidden beneath ice, making its ancient rocks extremely difficult to sample. Bei Chen and Ian Campbell of the Australian National University instead turned to detrital zircons \u2014 exceptionally durable crystals eroded from rocks and carried into sediments around the continent.<\/p>\n

They analyzed 1,712 grains and combined them with thousands of previously dated Antarctic zircons. They then folded those data into a global database, weighting samples by the area they represent. The resulting 8,995-grain compilation produced a striking signal: zircons dating from 650 million to 450 million years ago, when Gondwana was assembling, formed the largest supercontinent-related peak in the record.<\/p>\n

During the especially important interval from 540 million to 510 million years ago, 46 percent of the detrital zircons in the weighted database came from Antarctica and southeastern Australia. Even more telling were zircons depleted in lutetium, a chemical fingerprint associated with formation under the intense pressures found beneath very high mountains.<\/p>\n

\u201cZircons can form at any pressure, but low-lutetium zircons can only form at high pressure in the roots of high mountains,\u201d Campbell and geologist Ziyi Zhu told Big Think in 2022<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That earlier 2022 supermountain study<\/a> identified Gondwana and the much older supercontinent Nuna as the two great supermountain episodes in Earth history. In both cases, researchers found unusually large numbers of zircon crystals formed under the extreme pressures found deep beneath very high mountains.<\/p>\n

The new study makes the Gondwana episode look much bigger and more complicated. These were not simply one continuous chain of peaks stretching across the supercontinent. Several continental collisions built separate Himalayan-style mountain belts at different places and times. Together, the major collision zones extended for roughly 20,000 kilometers, more than twice the length of the modern Alpine-Himalayan mountain system.<\/p>\n

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The researchers argue that at least two regions may have resembled the modern Himalaya-Tibetan Plateau in scale: one along the East African Orogen, where Africa, India and neighboring continental blocks collided, and another in what is now Antarctica. The mountains themselves have long since eroded away. What may remain beneath the Antarctic ice are their deep geological roots \u2014 rocks compressed and transformed under the enormous pressures generated beneath towering ranges.<\/p>\n

How mountains can change an atmosphere<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Reconstruction of Gondwana highlighting core blocks, interior orogens and peripheral orogens. Credit: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2026.<\/p>\n

Although they seem like they\u2019ve always been there, mountains do not stay put. Rain, ice and rivers grind them down, carrying phosphorus, iron and other nutrients toward the sea. The authors argue that erosion from the Gondwanan ranges fed enormous submarine sediment fans, including a system stretching from East Antarctica toward southeastern Australia.<\/p>\n

Those nutrients could have stimulated algae and cyanobacteria, increasing photosynthesis and food production. But producing oxygen is only half the equation. When dead organisms and other organic matter decompose, they consume oxygen again, preventing it from accumulating in the atmosphere. <\/p>\n

The key, the researchers argue, was burying that organic matter quickly. If carbon-rich material was swept into deep sediment and sealed away before it could fully decay, less oxygen was used up. Over millions of years, that could allow more oxygen to remain in the oceans and atmosphere.<\/p>\n

That is where the enormous sediment fans may have entered the picture. As the Gondwanan mountains eroded, rivers and underwater flows rapidly carried carbon-rich mud and pyrite into deep basins, burying them before much of that material could react with oxygen. The researchers estimate that this vast \u201csuper-fan\u201d system contained more than 3.6 \u00d7 10^20 kilograms of sediment. Based on its likely carbon and sulfur content, they calculate that this burial could have spared about 2.2 \u00d7 10^19 kilograms of oxygen from being consumed \u2014 roughly 18 times the amount of oxygen in today\u2019s atmosphere, spread over the entire mountain-building interval.<\/p>\n

That number sounds extraordinary, but it does not mean Earth ever had 18 times more oxygen than it does now. Oxygen was constantly being produced and removed by chemical reactions, volcanic gases and, later, respiration. <\/p>\n

For their part, Chen and Campbell stress that their oxygen estimate is highly uncertain. Its purpose is not to reconstruct an exact ancient oxygen level, but to show that the scale of carbon and sulfur burial was large enough for their proposed mechanism to be plausible.<\/p>\n

A tectonic stage, not a smoking gun<\/p>\n

The idea fits into a broader effort to connect Gondwana\u2019s assembly with the extraordinary biological changes around the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition. A separate Science Advances study published this month<\/a> used isotopic data from more than 25,000 igneous rocks to argue that \u201cGreater Gondwana\u201d contained about 80 percent of Earth\u2019s continental landmass. Its authors proposed another tectonic route to ancient Earth\u2019s massive biological change: a near-global volcanic arc that may have released greenhouse gases and helped shift Earth from icehouse toward greenhouse conditions.<\/p>\n

The mechanisms are not mutually exclusive. One emphasizes erosion, nutrients and carbon burial; the other emphasizes volcanism and climate. But neither settles for sure why animal diversity accelerated when it did.<\/p>\n

Indeed, a major review of Earth\u2019s oxygenation history<\/a> found that the relationship between rising oxygen and complex life remains unresolved; oxygen may have enabled new ecosystems, but biological innovations could also have altered oxygen cycling. The Antarctic study has its own loose end: geochemical evidence hints at oxygenation changes around 800 million years ago, before its proposed supermountain engine reached full strength.<\/p>\n


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