As a 'hobby geology enthusiast' from BC, I loved this lecture. Lots of pausing & digesting needed, but my spacebar survived. Thank you very much for making this lecture publicly available.
I am fascinated by the age, size and location of Appalachian Mountains, Pangean Mountains. People have no idea where you can still find them, nor how huge they were.
Useful additional context could be gained by showing the Equator on each of these maps. So we don't get left with the impression that the Laurentian craton has always been around the same latitudes.
I work miocene tectonics of central chile for metallogenic processes. I work near a plate fold. You come so close to metallogenic processes. I find them worth considering. You should play around with metallogenic tectonics. I think you will do a good job. There is a lot of work in the Andes.
Excellent lecture. So much information here, necessitating several pauses and review! I had no idea the San Andreas was due to ridge subduction. Thank you for a more comprehensive understanding of the rich history of my home continent. As an autodidact geologist I applaud the bounty of teaching made available to the public by scholars like yourself. Be proud of the online legacy you leave!
Excellent presentation of a fascinating subject. I was tempted to go into geology, but mainly for oil exploration. Anyway at that time plate tectonics, then called continental drift, was not taken seriously by geologists who were interested in maintaining their professional status because the idea was proposed by a meteorologist, and what do they know about rocks...
The majority of the Ozark Plateau is Ordovician rock, primarily the Salem Plateau. Don't know if that's considered west, but it's not necessarily east, south or north 😂 in biomes, silvology, plant books etc, it is considered "eastern deciduous forest". If I'm not mistaken, the purple in the middle with the orange dot inside it to the right is the Ordovician rocks of the Ozarks. The orange dot is the St. Francois mountains which is Precambrian and Cambrian, around the purple Ordovician is a line of Mississippian and than mainly Pennsylvanian around that. And the boothill is Tertiary and Quaternary.
Yes, there are certainly Cambrian and Ordovician rocks elsewhere in North America, including the localities you mention. The ones in the western NA Cordillera (especially the Cambrian rocks) are among the stratigraphically thickest globally, however, and are therefore very well-studied.
Thank you for this very informative video. As an untrained geology hobbyist, I'm sure it will take several viewings to unpack all the information contained here. However, as a Utah resident, there is one error that jumped out at me. At about the 22:38 mark in the video you present a slide of "the Wave" and identify it as being located in Zion National Park, which is incorrect. The Wave is actually located in the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument in northern Arizona, about 90 km ESE of Zion NP. Nit-picky...I know. ;) Thanks again for helping me better understand the geology of my home state. :)
Wow! You are so smart. I wish I could understand it all :) I'm interested in how the Hudson Bay and Nunavut islands suddenly showed up. Was there volcanic event that melted the ice sheet there? Looks like Hudson Bay was there from the beginning of the timeline, so there was a preexisting plain/depression? It is central to the craton/Canadian Shield flood basalt. So it seems like maybe it could be a caldera. A huge mantle plume hot spot under it a long time ago?
Very informative. Always looking up random scientific videos. Came across this. Would love an easy coast version of this video. Given the fact that I live in New Jersey and saw an episode on “How the earth was made: New York” and although that was made over 10 years ago, would love an in depth analysis of the eastern part of the US. Either way, cool video, hope to see more
I'm curious. Would there have been any oregenic events between the acreted Protopaleozoic blocks in green. Soecifically between the Yavapia and the Mataztal. I'm currently sitting just about on the border for that in SE Wisconsin
Was the state of Nevada near the equator 95 million years ago? I’d like to know the longitude of the current state of Nevada 95 million years ago. Can you help me?
One of the example photos ( at 29:10 ) of Sevier style folding is Mount Kidd, in the Front (eastern) Ranges of the Canadian Rockies. My understanding was that these were the last-uplifted part of that range. Does this mean that there was no Laramide mountain building in western Canada?
While I realize a lot of work has been done on the geologic origins of California, I feel like California is an incomplete stand-in for all of Western North America and doesn't represent the origins of the Pacific NW and the current issues with the geologic origins there, particularly the paleomagnetic data.
True, the PNW and also southern AK have different histories from CA and this lecture is southwest-Cordillera-focused so as to include the San Andreas Fault system.
My biggest objection to the theories stated here are the assumptions by geologists, and others, that "everything has alwats been the same". I doubt North America looked like it does today as recently as 10,000 years ago. It could be significantly less than that. What we see, today, is "where everything ended up", during the most recent set of catastrophic influences that affected positioning, and placement. That these events are not considered renders null much theorizing, because you are only grasping the "tail" of the "elephant" (see the parable of the "Six Blind Indian Fakirs Describing an Elephant to the Rajah"). The Grand Canyon was "carved" by massive amounts of water (I estimate a half-trillion acre-feet of water, sent suddenly westward, about 4,250 years ago). Some of that water joined the puddle of water already there, and did the rest of the damage. Oh, and Earth has not always had "oceans". Seas, large lakes, yes, but oceans, nope. It might have had one, but one Plate Tectonics theorizer shows the "Pacific Plate" as a tiny piece surrounded by now-missing plates, in the middle of the area the Pacific Ocean covers. These "seas" were relatively shallow, perhaps a matter of hundreds of feet deep, at most. Later events would pit the plates against one another, causing depressions, to allow water to drain off the "continents", into the gathering Oceans. The "Great Unconformity" was the result of some of this "tectonic" activity, when one plate was shoved against another, separating it into layers, pushing one layer, more hardened that others, over those nearby. What we have, as a result, is "over-intellectualization", caused by blindly accepting theories, despite clear evidence other things happened, more recently, more devastatingly, and more incisively. The ancient past is as murky, ill-defined, and misperceived, as ever. Why do "professionals" persist in ignoring the anecdotal evidence of catastrophism, in favor of crackpot theories about long, long, long ago? No doubt, a great many things happened over the four-point-five billion years of Earth's existence, but the Earth we know and love is a relatively recent creation, looking very little like the Earth our most-distant ancestors knew. The Appalachian Mountains were "attached" to the ONAC a long time ago, but the Rockies, Sierras, and other western ranges are vastly younger. Oh, and the big question, the "$64,000 question", as it were, is as plain as the nose on your face: What caused the plates to do the things you describe? What caused them to not only "move", but CRASH INTO others, with great force? I suspect the Rockies, alone, weigh in the range of quadrillions of tons. What would it take, to push them, until their peaks top out at 14,000 feet above mean sea level? Think carefully of your answer, because the follow-up question is even harder. Why haven't these things taken place, in the last 2,750 years? I mean, yeah, Krakatoa, the 2004 tsunami, the 2011 tsunami, but nothing moved on the map, with those, or any of the Earth's other hard points. If your theory is that Earth went through a prolonged siege of attempted self-destruction, I hope you realize how self-serving that kind of answer is. I believe the story is far more personal, to humans, far more violent, and totally caused by an extraterrestrial force. One that is still tidally-locked with Earth, some millennia later, for, yep, you guessed it, two thousand, seven hundred fifty years. Oh, and Florida, around to the Yucatan, including Cuba, the Bahamas, and the eastern flanks of the Sierra Madres, are even newer additions to the "continent".
This makes it sound like we've got the cordillera all sorted out. 😅 There's some interesting evidence for a period of _westward_ subduction. Also, there are proposals that the Laramide orogeny results from accretion and "hit and run" northward translation of some large archipelago or "ribbon continent" -- rejecting the flat subduction explanation pretty much entirely, as far as I can tell. And the accretion of Siletizia doesn't even rate in an overview this broad, eh.
This is a very general overview intended for an undergraduate audience in Europe, so it is indeed quite simplified and doesn't have the length/scope to present all alternative hypotheses. Still lots left to sort out in the Cordillera, no question!
Lame that this lecture fails to expand on the youngest and very interesting geology of Oregon and Washington. The flood basalts and high cascades, the clockwise rotation, and many other things from the youngest part of North America.
Those have been shown to be water deposited sand not alliance this is demonstrated in experiments that show the angle of the water deposited crossbeds vis a vis the alliance, so please correct.
There is no peer-reviewed literature that I am aware of to support this claim. All peer-reviewed scientific sources indicate the Navajo sandstones are eolian in origin so there is nothing incorrect about the presentation.
Great - simple and well explained.
Very impressive. Lots of articulated details presented in an effectively paced delivery
As a 'hobby geology enthusiast' from BC, I loved this lecture. Lots of pausing & digesting needed, but my spacebar survived. Thank you very much for making this lecture publicly available.
That book that she mentions is awesome.
Thorough, well illustrated, and most corherent delivery. Thanks!
I am fascinated by the age, size and location of Appalachian Mountains, Pangean Mountains. People have no idea where you can still find them, nor how huge they were.
Useful additional context could be gained by showing the Equator on each of these maps. So we don't get left with the impression that the Laurentian craton has always been around the same latitudes.
I love this lecture. I will be going back to it again and again, because there's so much to absorb.
Thanks so much, glad you found it useful!
This is great. As an amateur enthusiast with no training of any kind, this is very helpful and broad. Love the images; they are so helpful. Thank you.
Me too.
I work miocene tectonics of central chile for metallogenic processes. I work near a plate fold. You come so close to metallogenic processes. I find them worth considering. You should play around with metallogenic tectonics. I think you will do a good job. There is a lot of work in the Andes.
Excellent lecture. So much information here, necessitating several pauses and review! I had no idea the San Andreas was due to ridge subduction. Thank you for a more comprehensive understanding of the rich history of my home continent. As an autodidact geologist I applaud the bounty of teaching made available to the public by scholars like yourself. Be proud of the online legacy you leave!
Thanks for your interest and support David!
Excellent presentation of a fascinating subject. I was tempted to go into geology, but mainly for oil exploration. Anyway at that time plate tectonics, then called continental drift, was not taken seriously by geologists who were interested in maintaining their professional status because the idea was proposed by a meteorologist, and what do they know about rocks...
Wow that is a lot of information. Great work explaining with diagrams this North American tectonic history.
The majority of the Ozark Plateau is Ordovician rock, primarily the Salem Plateau.
Don't know if that's considered west, but it's not necessarily east, south or north 😂 in biomes, silvology, plant books etc, it is considered "eastern deciduous forest".
If I'm not mistaken, the purple in the middle with the orange dot inside it to the right is the Ordovician rocks of the Ozarks. The orange dot is the St. Francois mountains which is Precambrian and Cambrian, around the purple Ordovician is a line of Mississippian and than mainly Pennsylvanian around that. And the boothill is Tertiary and Quaternary.
Yes, there are certainly Cambrian and Ordovician rocks elsewhere in North America, including the localities you mention. The ones in the western NA Cordillera (especially the Cambrian rocks) are among the stratigraphically thickest globally, however, and are therefore very well-studied.
Absolutely fascinating presentation and content. Just ordered Blakey's book for more detail.
Thank you for this very informative video. As an untrained geology hobbyist, I'm sure it will take several viewings to unpack all the information contained here. However, as a Utah resident, there is one error that jumped out at me. At about the 22:38 mark in the video you present a slide of "the Wave" and identify it as being located in Zion National Park, which is incorrect. The Wave is actually located in the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument in northern Arizona, about 90 km ESE of Zion NP. Nit-picky...I know. ;)
Thanks again for helping me better understand the geology of my home state. :)
Thanks for the correction Brian- you are right- my mistake!
Wow! You are so smart. I wish I could understand it all :) I'm interested in how the Hudson Bay and Nunavut islands suddenly showed up. Was there volcanic event that melted the ice sheet there? Looks like Hudson Bay was there from the beginning of the timeline, so there was a preexisting plain/depression? It is central to the craton/Canadian Shield flood basalt. So it seems like maybe it could be a caldera. A huge mantle plume hot spot under it a long time ago?
Unfortunately this speaker mostly focused on the west coast.
Wikipedia has articles about the Canadian Shield and Hudson Bay that explains why the bay formed.
Very informative. Always looking up random scientific videos. Came across this. Would love an easy coast version of this video. Given the fact that I live in New Jersey and saw an episode on “How the earth was made: New York” and although that was made over 10 years ago, would love an in depth analysis of the eastern part of the US. Either way, cool video, hope to see more
Thanks Joseph-- glad you enjoyed the video!
Great lecture! Thx
I'm curious. Would there have been any oregenic events between the acreted Protopaleozoic blocks in green. Soecifically between the Yavapia and the Mataztal. I'm currently sitting just about on the border for that in SE Wisconsin
Was the state of Nevada near the equator 95 million years ago? I’d like to know the longitude of the current state of Nevada 95 million years ago. Can you help me?
One of the example photos ( at 29:10 ) of Sevier style folding is Mount Kidd, in the Front (eastern) Ranges of the Canadian Rockies.
My understanding was that these were the last-uplifted part of that range.
Does this mean that there was no Laramide mountain building in western Canada?
Yes, I think this is correct, the thrusting was dominantly thin-skinned in Canada and ended by about ~60 Ma as I recall.
While I realize a lot of work has been done on the geologic origins of California, I feel like California is an incomplete stand-in for all of Western North America and doesn't represent the origins of the Pacific NW and the current issues with the geologic origins there, particularly the paleomagnetic data.
True, the PNW and also southern AK have different histories from CA and this lecture is southwest-Cordillera-focused so as to include the San Andreas Fault system.
Do we know how this process played out? What was going on that caused the plates to rift and then move to subduction?
I like my cratons like I like my croutons. Thick and stable.
You only live once, at least visit the crumbled ones, odds are they don’t crumble while you’re there.
My biggest objection to the theories stated here are the assumptions by geologists, and others, that "everything has alwats been the same". I doubt North America looked like it does today as recently as 10,000 years ago. It could be significantly less than that. What we see, today, is "where everything ended up", during the most recent set of catastrophic influences that affected positioning, and placement. That these events are not considered renders null much theorizing, because you are only grasping the "tail" of the "elephant" (see the parable of the "Six Blind Indian Fakirs Describing an Elephant to the Rajah"). The Grand Canyon was "carved" by massive amounts of water (I estimate a half-trillion acre-feet of water, sent suddenly westward, about 4,250 years ago). Some of that water joined the puddle of water already there, and did the rest of the damage.
Oh, and Earth has not always had "oceans". Seas, large lakes, yes, but oceans, nope. It might have had one, but one Plate Tectonics theorizer shows the "Pacific Plate" as a tiny piece surrounded by now-missing plates, in the middle of the area the Pacific Ocean covers. These "seas" were relatively shallow, perhaps a matter of hundreds of feet deep, at most. Later events would pit the plates against one another, causing depressions, to allow water to drain off the "continents", into the gathering Oceans. The "Great Unconformity" was the result of some of this "tectonic" activity, when one plate was shoved against another, separating it into layers, pushing one layer, more hardened that others, over those nearby.
What we have, as a result, is "over-intellectualization", caused by blindly accepting theories, despite clear evidence other things happened, more recently, more devastatingly, and more incisively. The ancient past is as murky, ill-defined, and misperceived, as ever. Why do "professionals" persist in ignoring the anecdotal evidence of catastrophism, in favor of crackpot theories about long, long, long ago? No doubt, a great many things happened over the four-point-five billion years of Earth's existence, but the Earth we know and love is a relatively recent creation, looking very little like the Earth our most-distant ancestors knew.
The Appalachian Mountains were "attached" to the ONAC a long time ago, but the Rockies, Sierras, and other western ranges are vastly younger. Oh, and the big question, the "$64,000 question", as it were, is as plain as the nose on your face: What caused the plates to do the things you describe? What caused them to not only "move", but CRASH INTO others, with great force? I suspect the Rockies, alone, weigh in the range of quadrillions of tons. What would it take, to push them, until their peaks top out at 14,000 feet above mean sea level?
Think carefully of your answer, because the follow-up question is even harder. Why haven't these things taken place, in the last 2,750 years? I mean, yeah, Krakatoa, the 2004 tsunami, the 2011 tsunami, but nothing moved on the map, with those, or any of the Earth's other hard points. If your theory is that Earth went through a prolonged siege of attempted self-destruction, I hope you realize how self-serving that kind of answer is. I believe the story is far more personal, to humans, far more violent, and totally caused by an extraterrestrial force. One that is still tidally-locked with Earth, some millennia later, for, yep, you guessed it, two thousand, seven hundred fifty years. Oh, and Florida, around to the Yucatan, including Cuba, the Bahamas, and the eastern flanks of the Sierra Madres, are even newer additions to the "continent".
This makes it sound like we've got the cordillera all sorted out. 😅 There's some interesting evidence for a period of _westward_ subduction. Also, there are proposals that the Laramide orogeny results from accretion and "hit and run" northward translation of some large archipelago or "ribbon continent" -- rejecting the flat subduction explanation pretty much entirely, as far as I can tell.
And the accretion of Siletizia doesn't even rate in an overview this broad, eh.
This is a very general overview intended for an undergraduate audience in Europe, so it is indeed quite simplified and doesn't have the length/scope to present all alternative hypotheses. Still lots left to sort out in the Cordillera, no question!
I saw lots of DRAGON feathers
Lame that this lecture fails to expand on the youngest and very interesting geology of Oregon and Washington. The flood basalts and high cascades, the clockwise rotation, and many other things from the youngest part of North America.
አንድአመት360ቀንዉ
Those have been shown to be water deposited sand not alliance this is demonstrated in experiments that show the angle of the water deposited crossbeds vis a vis the alliance, so please correct.
Aolian not alliance cursed auto-correct.
There is no peer-reviewed literature that I am aware of to support this claim. All peer-reviewed scientific sources indicate the Navajo sandstones are eolian in origin so there is nothing incorrect about the presentation.