In his free time last summer, Rice University geoscientist Ming Tang made a habit of comparing the niobium content in various rocks in a global minerals database.
In his free time last summer, Rice University geoscientist Ming Tang made a habit of comparing the niobium content in various rocks in a global minerals database. What he found was worth skipping a few nights out with friends.
In a paper published this month by Nature Communications, Tang, Rice petrologist Cin-Ty Lee and colleagues offered an answer to one of Earth science’s fundamental questions: Where do continents form?
“If our conclusions are correct, every piece of land that we are now sitting on got its start someplace like the Andes or Tibet, with very mountainous surfaces,” said Tang, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral research associate in Rice’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences (EEPS). “Today, most places are flat because that is the stable stage of the continental crust. But what we found was that when the crust formed, it had to start out with mountain-building processes.”
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Image: The central Andes Mountains and surrounding landscape, as seen in this true-color image from NASA’s Terra spacecraft, formed over the past 170 million years as the Nazca Plate lying under the Pacific Ocean has forced its way under the South American Plate. CREDIT: NASA
