Thanks Chet and Maureen

I was tracking down some of the history of erosion theories. Specifically, I wanted the sources behind the widely accepted theory that we live on a cold planet today because we have so many mountains. Mountains expose rock to the elements, and weathered rock releases nutrients to the sea, and life turns nutrients into buried carbon. We appear to have not just very low atmospheric CO₂ levels these days, but basically the lowest possible CO₂ levels. (As civilization is accustomed to that, it means that a rather small perturbation in CO₂ levels, in geologic terms, has a relatively great effect in human terms.)

The theory linking mountain uplift to the late Cenozoic ice ages was propounded by Maureen Raymo in the 1980s. I'm thanking her in this post because her Web site, www.moraymo.us, has a bunch of papers tracing the theory's development since then.

And I'm thanking her father, the writer Chet Raymo, for his wonderful blog at sciencemusings.com, treating science in a most humanist way. I've added it to my blogs list.

On erosion:
Not Your Grandfather's Erosion
Mass Wasting: Power Erosion
The Remarkable Tibetan Plateau