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Andes
The world's longest continental mountain range, the 7,000-km spine of South America
The Andes run unbroken down the entire western edge of a continent, some 7,000 kilometres from the Caribbean coast of Venezuela to the storm-lashed tip of Tierra del Fuego. No other mountain chain on land is so long. Along the way it crosses the equator and the tropics, climbs to the bone-dry Altiplano, and finally drops into Patagonian ice, holding the highest summit outside Asia and a string of smoking volcanoes. It is a range that defines weather, water, and human settlement across seven nations.
The Andes are a textbook example of a subduction-zone range, built where the oceanic Nazca plate dives beneath the South American plate, melting rock that feeds a long arc of volcanoes and crumpling the crust into parallel cordilleras. The highest point, Aconcagua in Argentina, reaches about 6,961 metres. Between the ranges lie high basins and the vast Altiplano plateau, while the western slope borders the Atacama, the driest desert on Earth. The chain spans Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina.
The Andes cradled some of the Americas' great civilisations, from the pre-Inca cultures of the central highlands to the Inca empire whose road network and stonework still thread the peaks. Potatoes, quinoa, and the domesticated llama and alpaca all originate here. Silver from Andean mines once financed the Spanish empire, and copper, lithium, and other ores remain central to the modern economies that ring the range. Today its glaciers, shrinking fast, are a fragile water tower for the cities and farms below.