Chilly winds, rugged slopes, flurries of snow – mountains, in general, are such majestic features of the planet, aren’t they? While they could form through one or more of the mechanisms of faulting, folding and volcanism, some of the most awe-inspiring mountains occur in Fold-Thrust Belts (FTB) found at tectonic plate boundaries. They could be a product of subduction of an oceanic plate under a continental one (or rather the continental part of a plate because no tectonic plate is composed entirely of continental material) and the resulting volcanism, or of terrane accretion (wherein oceanic ridges and islands get added to the mainland, thus causing uplift), or of intercontinental collision (with the exhumation of sedimentary rocks and the wedging of one plate under the other causing the uplift). The three of these processes generally occur successively.
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