Earth’s mountains grew taller in two big spurts, and that may be what fed the rise of oxygen and complex life, a new study says
Taller mountains wore down faster, washing nutrients such as phosphorus into the oceans, the researchers propose.
The mountains that made Earth livable may have grown in two big growth spurts, and each one lines up with a jump in the oxygen in the air and the spread of more complex life, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances.
The idea: taller mountains erode faster, and that erosion washes nutrients such as phosphorus, which every living thing needs, into the oceans. Before about 3 billion years ago, those nutrients were mostly locked in rock and the oceans were “quite nutrient-starved,” said lead author Matthijs Smit, an earth scientist at the University of British Columbia.
What they found
By the time of the first big rise in oxygen, about 2.2 billion years ago, mountains had grown from near sea level to about half the height of today’s Himalayas, the university said. The second spurt came around the second major oxygen rise, about 700 million years ago.
Over those two spurts, the thickest crust under mountain ranges went from about 30 kilometers to 60 kilometers, roughly 19 to 37 miles, and later to nearly 90 kilometers, about 56 miles. The researchers suspect the change is linked to Earth’s interior slowly cooling, which changed how mountains are built.
How they did it
Mountains erode away, so the team couldn’t measure ancient peaks directly. Instead they studied metamorphic rocks, rocks that were squeezed and heated after colliding tectonic plates pushed them deep underground, which record how thick the crust above them once was. The rocks span the past 3 billion years.
The link between mountains and life is a correlation, not proof. “It’s likely not a coincidence,” said co-author Ellen Kooijman of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, but the researchers describe mountains as a possible driver, one that may have mattered more than scientists assumed.
Source: University of British Columbia news release, Nov. 13, 2026; Smit et al., “Raising mountains for a habitable Earth,” Science Advances.