Why do mountains arise in the interior of continents, far from the edges of tectonic plates where deformation — and thus mountain building — is expected?
To answer this question, Scott Dyksterhuis and Dietmar Müller of the University of Sydney in Australia modelled the stress regimes that have helped push up the Flinders Ranges and other nearby mountain belts in the middle of the Australian plate.
They concluded that the plate interior can be affected by forces at the plate edges thousands of kilometres away — a finding that could help explain deformation in the middle of other tectonic plates.
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Geophysics: Mysterious mountains. Nature 453, 827 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/453827c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/453827c
