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Many of the mountain ranges we walk and climb up would be far less vertiginous were it not for the lubricating effects of plankton, a new study has revealed. Two billion years ago, a boom in the microscopic marine organisms led to prime conditions for orogeny, or mountain building. As the Earth's tectonic plates collided, the carbon from dead plankton on the sea bed became slick graphite under heat and pressure, which acted as a lubricant enabling the sliding, stacking and folding of the Earth's crust to form mountain ranges. Without it, friction would quickly have ground things to a halt, making molehills rather than the lofty peaks we know and love today.
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