Princeton, NJ - According to Morgan Kelly of Princeton, "People commonly perceive mountain ranges as jumbles of pyramid-shaped masses that steadily narrow as they slope upward. While that’s certainly how they appear from a ground-level human viewpoint, a new study shows that pyramid-shaped mountains are not only a minority in nature, but also that most ranges actually increase in area at higher elevations.
Besides reshaping the mountains in our mind’s eye, the findings could lead scientists to reconsider conservation strategies — which are often based on misconceptions about mountain terrain — for mountain animal species threatened by climate change.
Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Connecticut conducted the first study to map the shape of the world’s major mountain ranges and found that the classic triangular form in which land-area uniformly decreases as elevation increases only applies to roughly one-third of the world’s mountain ranges, according to a report in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Instead, the 182 mountain ranges the researchers studied take on four principal shapes: diamond, pyramid, inverted pyramid and hourglass. The researchers analyzed high-resolution topography maps for every mountain range to determine land area by elevation. They found that for all the range shapes except pyramid, land availability can be greater at higher elevations than it is farther down the mountainside.
For the story: https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2015/05/18/reshaping-mountains-in-the-human-mind-to-save-species-facing-climate-change-nature-climate-change/
Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Connecticut conducted the first study to map the shape of the world’s major mountain ranges and found that the classic triangular form in which land-area uniformly decreases as elevation increases only applies to roughly one-third of the world’s mountain ranges, according to a report in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Instead, the 182 mountain ranges the researchers studied take on four principal shapes: diamond, pyramid, inverted pyramid and hourglass. The researchers analyzed high-resolution topography maps for every mountain range to determine land area by elevation. They found that for all the range shapes except pyramid, land availability can be greater at higher elevations than it is farther down the mountainside.
For the story: https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2015/05/18/reshaping-mountains-in-the-human-mind-to-save-species-facing-climate-change-nature-climate-change/
