Welcome to my homepage about mountains! This page was created for you so you could learn about mountains! A mountain is a landform that is higher than the area around it and it is larger than a hill. About 25% of the Earth’s landmass is mountainous and they are very important to the world. Mountains connect to the Earth’s past because they are constantly changing. Most people think that the mountains we have today have been on the world forever, but there wrong! Mountains have been growing and shrinking over millions and millions of years.

Mountains are everywhere on are planet. Most are in mountain ranges or groups of mountains formed near each other. Others are in our oceans buried under water. Where ever the mountains are each has its own unique features. The geography of mountains depends on where they are and how they are formed. Volcanoes are formed from magma that rises to the Earth’s surface, and other types of mountains are formed from plate tectonics in different ways. They can push each other up, one plate goes up and the other goes down, or they spread apart. For more information, follow this link to a greater plate tectonic site.

A volcano is a landform that is very similar to a mountain. Volcanoes are usually formed from molten magma rising up through the earth’s crust and hardening. The magma keeps rising and hardening until it becomes high enough to be called a mountain. Most volcanoes tend to be located near plate boundaries or on hot spots. Hot spots are located far away from plate boundaries. Hawaii is located on a hot spot and it is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Most mountains that we have today didn’t exist millions and millions of years ago. In fact, the highest mountains like the Himalayas and the Rocky Mountains are the youngest. The Appalachian Mountains are smaller, but older than the Rockies. This could be proven by carbon copying some rocks taken from each location. Mountains can tell us a lot about the past. They tell us where they could have been and how Pangaea broke apart. One example of that are the Appalachians and the hills of Great Britain. They were once connected as a great mountain range but now they are just hills. When the two plates that the mountain range was on broke apart, the mountains spread out and became hills.

Photo of the Rocky Mountains

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