US Elevation.
by @cstats1
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 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.
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.
I grew up in the Blue Ridge. I wrote this the first time I flew to the west coast:
“I don’t trust young mountains.
It’s like they’re in a hurry to be somewhere. None of the slow thoughtfulness and deliberation of ancient tracts like the Appalachians, these mountains look rushed, as if they were put here in haste and are trying to get to the places they really belong. As though the painter of the map realized he’d left too much open canvas flat and jotted in mountains as an after thought and without much attention. Without the painstaking care of the old hills. Without the patience of the Blue Ridge. Without the cadence of the Smokies, or the candor of the Alleghenies. The ancient peaks are peace in stone. Rest built into the skin of the land. They have bones that run deep, roots below their forests, and certainty of self. These new mountains are not yet sure what they are. They have not had enough rain to drink. They have not cared for enough trees. They do not sleep. They are anxious. They are too fast. I do not trust young mountains.”
