How quickly the Andes Mountains reached their current height, an average elevation of 13,000 feet, has been a contentious debate in geological circles. Some researchers claim the mountains rose abruptly and others maintain that the uplift was a more gradual process.

Paleoclimatologists writing in Science suggests that the quick-rise view is based on misinterpreted evidence. What some geologists interpret as signs of an abrupt rise are actually indications of ancient climate change, the researchers say. The confusion results when ratios of oxygen's two main isotopes, oxygen-18 and oxygen-16, are used to estimate past elevation.

"In the modern climate, there is a well-known inverse relationship between oxygen isotopic values in rain and elevation," said Christopher Poulsen, a researcher at the Department of Geological Sciences, University of Michigan. "As a rain cloud ascends a mountain range, it begins to precipitate. Because oxygen-18 is more massive than oxygen-16, it is preferentially rained out. Thus, as you go up the mountain, the precipitation becomes more and more depleted in oxygen-18, and the ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 decreases."


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"If the ratio decreases with time, as the samples get younger, the interpretation would typically be that there has been an increase in elevation at that location," said Poulsen. In fact, that's exactly the conclusion of a series of papers on the uplift history of the Andes published over the past four years. Using oxygen isotopes in carbonate rocks, the authors posited that the central Andes rose about 8,200 to 11,500 feet in three million years, rather than gaining height over tens of millions of years, as other geologists believe.

But elevation isn't the only factor that affects oxygen isotope ratios in rain, Poulsen said. "It can also be affected by where the vapor came from and how much it rained---more intense rainfall also causes oxygen-18 to be preferentially rained out." Skeptical of the rapid-rise scenario, he and his colleagues performed climate modeling experiments to address the issue.

"The key result in our modeling study is that we identified an elevation threshold for rainfall," Poulsen said. "Once the Andes reached an elevation greater than 70 percent of the current elevation, the precipitation rate abruptly increased. In our model, the increased precipitation also caused the ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 to significantly decrease. Our conclusion, then, is that geologists have misinterpreted the isotopic records in the central Andes. The decrease in the ratio is not recording an abrupt increase in elevation; it is recording an abrupt increase in rainfall."


Citation: Christopher J. Poulsen, Todd A. Ehlers, Nadja Insel, 'Onset of Convective Rainfall During Gradual Late Miocene Rise of the Central Andes', Science Express, April 2010; doi:10.1126/science.1185078