man the Appalachian mountains really aren’t 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 Appalachians…
They said “before dinosaurs,” 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.
That’s because this cave began forming before bones existed on land, and had only just started to exist in the ocean. Shellfish hadn’t evolved yet. Limestone, which forms many caves, was just starting to become a more prevalent rock.
The mountains aren’t older than dinosaurs. They are older thanbones.
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.
that’s why they’re so small. they’re the last ancient remnants of a lava flow 5 miles thick. the lava didn’t 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 i’m 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. THAT’S how old the Appalachians are.
show the elders some respect, they have witnessed eons and are returning to the land from which they grew, it’s the kind of the passage of time on a scale that our human lives could not even begin to comprehend.
Give me ALL the geology discourse
Okay but something a lot of people don’t know is that New York City was supposed to have mountains as tall as the Alps in its backyard, ten times higher than any skyscraper in the city.
These mountains were called the Taconic Mountains.
You can watch a video on pbs.org for free here to learn more about it.
Watch the whole video to learn more about the geology of North America, the geological history of North America, and how it impacts North Americans today.
Start at 25:21 to learn more about the geology of New York City and how this shapes how the city was built and why construction can take so long sometimes.
Start at 30:05 to learn more about the Taconic Mountains specifically.
