An aerial view of the Andes mountains in Argentina. (Credit: Nicolas Prieto/Unsplash) There’s only one place on the planet where you can see flamingos roaming salt flats, vicuñas grazing in herds and condors soaring overhead, all as hot springs bubble beneath towering volcanoes. It’s the Altiplano of South America — a nearly 1,000-kilometer-long, otherworldly plateau that stretches from southern Peru through Bolivia and into Chile and Argentina. At an average 3,800 meters above sea level, the Altiplano is the high-altitude heart of the Andes Mountains. To the plateau’s east and its west, chains of mountains soar some 6 kilometers high, rocky backbones that snake along the western edge of the South American continent. The sheer volume of elevated ground makes it especially fascinating to those who study the Earth’s deep dynamics: How did so much land soar so high into the air? And how did that rise change the planet? Researchers do know how the story began: around 200 million years ago, when one enormous plate of Earth’s crust began diving beneath another. Around 45 million years ago, the process sped up, and the plate on top began crumpling skyward to form the Andes. But the details of how it happened have remained unclear.