Mountains rising

New Zealand’s 45 kilometer-long Southern Alps have been the subject of a ten year American study which has been collating data by GPS in order to determine how fast the mountain range is rising. The information collected is the first to record the vertical movement of a mountain range. “I don’t think anyone has done vertical movement outside of places like Canada. The reason that we chose to use the Southern Alps is because they are moving very quickly,” Peter Molnar of the University of Colorado-Boulder said. “The motivation behind this is finding out to what extent is this vertical movement due to plate movement and to what extent is it other effects such as erosion,” Molnar said. The paper appears in the September issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.