Rising mountains bring more biodiversity
Quoting Syris Valentine in Nautilus: "Though mountains cover only 25 percent of all land on Earth outside of Antarctica, they’re home to some 87 percent of all species of birds, mammals, and amphibians. But biodiversity varies wildly from one mountain to the next, which has been difficult to explain. Some scientists have called this “Humboldt’s enigma.”
Now a new paper published in Science suggests that the process of mountain building itself may be responsible—that the pace and magnitude of tectonic uplift determines how much rock, river channels, and microclimates fragment the landscape, and how many distinct ecological niches emerge. The greater the altitude and rate of lift, the greater the biodiversity a mountain will hold, the authors found.
“The evolution of life depends on the evolution of the geology, and the evolution of the climate,” says Indiana University Earth scientist Brian Yanites, one of the authors of the paper. “No matter where you’re at or who you are as a species, you’re there because of the interconnection of these different Earth systems.” "