Rump Mountains
A rump mountain is the heavily eroded remnant of a mountain formation that often took place a long time ago in the history of the earth . The term was introduced into literature in 1886 by Ferdinand von Richthofen . The hulls of the former mountains can be found in deeper regions of the crust everywhere on every continental plate (here they form the so-called basement) and, especially in Central Europe, they are exposed due to recent tectonics on the earth's surface.
The valley structures of the hull Mountains are often irregular structured than that of young fold mountains , suggesting much younger tectonic processes and the strong erosion of the previously often up to several thousand meters high mountains back. On the other hand, their plateaus are more orographically uniform .
Examples of rump mountains
In western Europe , many low mountain ranges belong to the Rumpfgebirge type - for example Harz , Erzgebirge , Fichtelgebirge and Rhenish Slate Mountains . Other mountain ranges on both sides of the Rhine , such as the Black Forest and Vosges , and in northeast Bavaria the Bavarian Forest via the Bohemian Forest to the Bohemian Massif in Austria and the Czech Republic , or the French Massif Central come from the time of the Variscan orogeny . This mountain formation took place in the middle Paleozoic , in the epochs of the Devonian and Carboniferous about 350 to 250 million years ago. Already in the Permian the Variscan high mountains had eroded into what is known as the Permian hull area and covered by layers of sediment . These remnants were preserved as Variscan “islands” between the younger sedimentary rocks of the Mesozoic Era. In the course of further geological history , the fracture tectonics followed , which shaped the current shape of the still existing German low mountain range. These Variscan rump mountains are mostly strongly influenced by magmatic processes.
Through the erosion of the mountains, numerous ore deposits were exposed, e.g. B. in the Harz iron ore and above all copper (the Rammelsberg is a type locality for SEDEX deposits), or in the Erzgebirge uranium.
The Caledonian Mountains in Scotland and the rest of the plateaus and coastal mountains in Scandinavia are even older, namely around 500 million years .
In North America, the almost 3000 km long mountain range of the Appalachians is one of the world's largest rump mountains. It stretches from the southern states of the USA to the eastern Canadian Newfoundland with a width of 200 to 300 kilometers , but only reaches heights of over 2000 meters in the south. Many deposits of coal, petroleum and iron ore as well as fertile plains make the mountains and their surroundings one of the most valuable areas in America .
The Urals between Eastern Europe and Siberia are of similar importance for mining and the economy ; This mountain range in Russia, which is up to 1900 meters high, is also comparable to the Appalachian Mountains in terms of its extent .
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Murawski, H., Meyer, W. (2004): Geological Dictionary. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, 11th edition, 262 pp. ISBN 3-8274-1445-8
- ^ Ferdinand von Richthofen: Guide for explorers . Instructions for making observations on objects of physical geography and geology. 1886, p. 654 ( Online - also called Abrasion Mountains by him.).