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Understanding Mountain Building: Forces within Earth and Geological Features from Stress

Explore the dynamic forces shaping Earth's landscapes through deformation, stress, and strain in rocks. Learn about brittle and ductile deformation, geologic features like folds and faults, types of mountains, and their formation at plate boundaries.

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Understanding Mountain Building: Forces within Earth and Geological Features from Stress

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  1. Mountain Building Sturdivant

  2. Forces within Earth • Deformation – any change in a rock’s shape (bending/breaking) • Stress – force acting over some area of rock (tension, compression, and shearing) • Strain – deformation of rock caused by stress • Rocks will deform in different ways depending on temperature, pressure, rock composition, and time

  3. Types of deformation • Brittle – at low temperature and pressure, rocks fracture due to stress • Ductile – at higher depths, rock may bend and warp without fracturing

  4. Geologic features from stress • During events such as mountain building, huge stresses are applied to rock • These stresses cause folds in the rock • Anticline (see a) • Syncline (see b) • Monocline (see c)

  5. More Geologic features from stress • As stresses are often associated with movement, we also see faults where stress is high • Normal Fault – tensional stress • Reverse Fault – compressional stress • Strike-Slip Fault – Shearing Stress

  6. Types of mountains • Folds and Faults together form many of the types of mountains on earth • Volcanic Mountain – formed due to igneous activity (Mt. Saint helens) • Folded Mountain – formed by compressional stress (alps) • Fault-Block Mountain - formed by tensional stress (Sierra Nevada) • Dome Mountain – dome shaped, formed as rock is upwarped (Black hills, SD)

  7. Mountains at plate boundaries • Convergent boundary mountains – ocean-ocean and ocean-continent convergence produces volcanic arcs (Philippines and the andes mountains) • Folded mountains are formed at ocean-continent boundaries as well, but our most notable folded mountains (Himalayas) form at continent-continent boundaries

  8. Mountains at plate boundaries (continued) • divergent boundary mountains – most often at the ocean floor, divergent boundaries allow for magma to rise and form mountains • Non-boundary mountains – some mountains are away from plates (such as Hawaii formed at local hot spots) and… the rocky mountains

  9. Formation of rocky mountains

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