The original background of the science fiction movie "Interstellar" is the destruction of the earth's environment, and civilization is facing a crisis, but if the mountains on the earth disappear, civilization will still face a crisis.
We generally believe that as long as there is a suitable size planet in the habitable zone of a star, and there is water, then it is possible to give birth to life on this planet and evolve civilizations.
Life can be born in the oceans, but civilizations must be born on the continents.
The continent that can give birth to civilization must have rolling mountains. Because there are mountains, there will be rivers, there will be lakes, there will be alluvial plains, there will be rich and diverse ecology, and different animals can evolve.
Without rivers, the water that falls on the surface is difficult to drain into the ocean, and a large amount of evaporation will form a saline land.
Mountains must have crust movements, and the forces that drive these movements come from within the planet. Therefore, we can also say that earthquakes and volcanoes are also the premise of civilization.
So for planets to give birth to civilizations, the core must be hot.
According to scientists' calculations, the Earth's interior is getting colder.
5 billion years ago, when the solar system was just formed, the heavens and the earth were chaotic. The largest clumps of material gather in the center of the nebula, forming stars, and small clumps of material gather around to form planets.
In an orbit 150 million kilometers from the primordial sun, the newly gathered mass of material formed the primordial Earth.
At that time, due to the contraction of gravitational potential energy, it was converted into heat. The whole earth is in a state of melting, and the dense material eventually sinks into the earth's interior to form the core, which includes various radioactive decay elements.
These decaying elements act as the Earth's furnace and energy engine, and the heat they produce first causes convection of the mantle, which, although slow, constantly drives the movement of the earth's crust on the surface. Plateau mountains form where they rise, canyon rifts form where they break, and volcanoes form where the crust cracks out of the mantle.
However, when everything is exhausted, one day the great furnace inside the earth will slowly cool as the radioactive decay elements decrease.
Of course, this cooling must have a certain process, but at the turning point, it actually means the beginning of the death of the earth.
According to scientists' estimates, the amount of heat output from the Earth's core to the mantle is 1.5 times higher than originally estimated, which means that the Earth's heat loss rate is 1.5 times higher than originally estimated, so the actual time of earth's death may be 1.5 times earlier.
Of course, the best outcome for humans is that the heat output of the Earth's core is slow and uniform, but humans have no way to control this process.
▍ The biggest consequence of the cooling of the earth, the orogeny stops.
Although earthquakes and volcanoes can bring disasters to humanity, it is an indispensable process in shaping nature, creating the natural world and human civilization.
The earth's overall orogeny ended during the Cretaceous period, that is, 100 million years ago, but the local crustal collision, orogeny is still continuing.
40 million years ago, the Indian plate and the Eurasian plate squeezed each other, forming a series of mountains and the Tibetan Plateau in western China.
The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is also known as the earth's water tower, because the water vapor from all sides reaches the 4-kilometer-high plateau, and there is no way to advance.
The water that descends to the surface forms the source of all the largest rivers in Asia, and the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, and Ganges all originate in the Himalayas to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.
Without the Tibetan Plateau, China could not be called China, because the area around Jiangnan would have become a desert.
The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau blocks all the humid water vapor blowing from the East China Sea, leaving 100% of this moisture in the Chinese mainland, creating the hometown of fish and rice in Jiangnan.
In terms of cultural attributes, the Liangzhu culture 5,000 years ago is rooted in this.
▍ Mountains will eventually be eroded by wind and rain and razed to the ground.
70 million years ago, the African Plate swooped down below the Eurasian Plate, and the crustal rocks at the top formed the majestic Alps, and its main peak was Mont Blanc, which was 4810 meters high.
The most important rivers of Western Europe, the Danube, rhine, Rhône and Po, all originate in the Alps, without which Western Europe would not have prospered.
To exaggerate, there would be no Europe without the Alps.
According to scientists' calculations, due to wind and rain erosion, the entire Alpine region is stripped of 0.4 millimeters per year, which means that the surface of the earth will drop by 4 meters every 10,000 years.
If the uplift of the Earth's crust does not occur again, then in 10 million years the Alps will be razed to the ground, and all the rivers and small environments on which all of Western Europe depends will be lost, and it will become a desert.
The same thing is happening on the Tibetan Plateau, which is being eroded.
According to scientists' estimates and the Indian Plate, it will still subduct below the Eurasian Plate every year, about fifty millimeters, but this dive will end in 20 million years.
However, the decline of the Tibetan Plateau may be far ahead of schedule, because the Tibetan Plateau itself is too high, and it will be flattened and collapsed under the action of its own gravity.
Moreover, flowing water and global warming have accelerated the process of surface erosion.
The Alps are still growing taller, but the growth of the Tibetan Plateau may have stopped.
At present, scientists have not given a clear result of the change in the average height of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, that is, this growth and erosion is currently in a glue state, which is a sign of reversal.
So, the end result in the future is that all the mountains of Asia will be destroyed, followed by Europe.
▍ What happens to Eurasia without mountains?
The Himalayas, which are more than 2,000 kilometers long, consist of a series of majestic peaks, 10 of which are more than 8 kilometers away, are both the geographical boundary between the Indian subcontinent and the Asian continent, and create special climatic conditions on both sides. In the southern foothills of the Himalayas there is an earth rain limit of more than 20,000 millimeters of rainfall , Kira punchi.
Water vapor from the southern Indian Ocean was blocked from crossing the Tibetan Plateau, creating a desert climate of drought and little rain in northwest China.
Water vapor in places like Xinjiang can only come from the Arctic Ocean, but the process is more than that of vast Russia.
If the mountains of Eurasia disappear completely, in the monsoon zone around 30 degrees north latitude. It will blow away all the water vapor, and from 30 degrees north latitude to near the equator, a large number of deserts and deserts will form.
The original northwest alpine region will receive more warm water vapor, rainfall will increase significantly, lush forests will grow, and grasslands will disappear.
Therefore, the entire earth will remain a small piece of rainforest near the equator, forming a vast desert belt across Europe and Asia, which will completely change the original geopolitical environment of the earth. Urban agglomerations near 30 degrees north latitude will all disappear, and civilization will end.
▍ Orogeny and the conjecture of ancient lost civilizations.
The most recent orogeny on Earth was the Yanshan Movement, which occurred 400 million years ago, and this movement stopped around 100 million years ago.
But according to the evolutionary history of the earth, the ancient earth is more active, and there should be more orogeny.
However, due to the change of the earth's crust caused by the violent orogeny movement, the original ocean has become land, and the original land has become the ocean, there is no clear geological and stratigraphic evidence, and the division is not very clear.
But every crustal movement that begins and stops is accompanied by drastic changes in the surface landform, as well as changes in the oceans and coastlines, which will lead to the rise and extinction of organisms.
In the same way, we can guess that it is very likely that higher species existed in ancient times, hundreds of millions of years ago, and the civilizations that evolved from them were buried deep under the surface during the cycle of these orogeny movements.
This may be related to the pulsation and unevenness of the amount of heat generated in the earth's interior, the increase in heat generation orogeny, the heat is in the trough period, and the ground will be eroded by wind and rain to become flat.
And the latter orogeny will bury the original surface formation deep underground.
In the history of human development, there is a mystery, that is, whether there was a civilization in ancient times, if they did, how did this civilization disappear, and where are their relics?
If you make a guess, there were super-civilizations on Earth about 400 million years ago, and then these civilizations disappeared because of the cessation of orogeny.
The next orogeny was followed, and these surface layers were buried thousands of meters underground.
This could explain a very important archaeological mystery as the formations dig deeper and backwarder, but suddenly advanced remains appear in deeply buried formations.