US Elevation.
by @cstats1
man the Appalachian mountains really arenβt shit huh
The Rockies are new, young and virile and fresh from the Laramide orogeny, tall and lanky teenagers on the geological scale. the Appalachian mountains are old, formed hundreds of millions of years ago before dinosaurs walked the Earth. They are ancients, elders, witnesses to half a billion years of life coming and going. To be tall is not a virtue. To be small is not a sin. The Appalachians are eroding under the weight of time, slowly shrinking and returning to the Earth from which they sprang. Appreciate them while they are still here.
I do want to say real quick again about the age of the Appalachiansβ¦
They said βbefore dinosaurs,β but we have a cave here that began forming between 450 million to 550 million years ago.
There are no bones in that cave. No fossils. No nothing.
Thatβs because this cave began forming before bones existed on land, and had only just started to exist in the ocean. Shellfish hadnβt evolved yet. Limestone, which forms many caves, was just starting to become a more prevalent rock.
The mountains arenβt older than dinosaurs. They are older than bones.
see that little lump up at the top of minnesota? the sawtooth mountains? so small most places would just call them hills?
those are over a billion years old.
thatβs why theyβre so small. theyβre the last ancient remnants of a lava flow 5 miles thick. the lava didnβt kill any dinosaurs. or any fish. or any animals at all. because there were no animals. you know what there was?
algae.
those mountains were 5 miles tall when the most advanced life on earth was algae.
so iβm just gonna go ahead and keep calling them mountains, even though all you need to climb them is hiking shoes and a nice afternoon. because a place where you can crouch down and touch basalt that was lava before leaves were invented deserves some respect.
The earth is unfathomably ancient, and you garner no love from her when you insult her eldest children.
not only that, the Appalachians predate the Atlantic Ocean and were fragmented. they stretch across three continents, as Atlas in Africa and Caledonians in Europe as you can see here:
the Appalachians are way way old. the fossils that ARE found in these ranges are ancient marine beings, whose fossil remains predate the anatomical structures of beings migrating to land for the first time. THATβS how old the Appalachians are.
show the elders some respect, they have witnessed eons and are returning to the land from which they grew, itβs the kind of the passage of time on a scale that our human lives could not even begin to comprehend.
Iβve seen both sets of mountains, and y'know what? Theyβre all beautiful.
If y'all think the Appalachian mountains are hot shit, you might be interested in the Canadian Shield, which is the oldest surface land on the planet. The youngest parts of the Canadiam shield are 2.5 billion years old, while the oldest land is 4.2 billion. Theyβre really fucking old. Which means their mountains are even less impressive but shhh dont worry about it we love them anyways. Also, the shield has a pretty thin layer of dirt, beneath which is just rock. And by rock, I mean the bedrock which is the core of the entire continent of North America. The whole region is fascinating.
Thereβs a reason Iβll be dragging my ass 2000 km back to Thunder Bay to attend university, and that reason is so I can study geology right on the Canadian shield.
