Live Science
By
February 4, 2022
Twice in our planet’s history, colossal mountain ranges that towered as tall as the Himalayas and stretched thousands of miles farther reared their craggy heads out of the Earth, splitting ancient supercontinents in two.
Geologists call them the “supermountains.”
“There’s nothing like these two supermountains today,” Ziyi Zhu, a postdoctoral student at The Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra and lead author of a new study on the mountain majesties, said in a statement. “It’s not just their height — if you can imagine the 1,500 miles (2,400 km) long Himalayas repeated three or four times, you get an idea of the scale.”