12 November 2008

Remembered hills


At 500 million years old, [the Gamburtsevs] may not be the oldest mountains on the planet, but they likely are the tallest of the ancient mountains still in existence.
-- notes Matt Kaplan with reference to work by Tina Van de Flierdt et al.

An earlier post asked if life might come back to the Gamburtsevs in a warmer world. At the time, I was not aware of research pointing to their age. But if they really are about 500 million years old, then it seems almost certain that they have been inhabited by organisms larger than microbes before now.

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