Roots of Mother Appalachia

Small? The Appalachians today are the resting skeleton of a mountain range so tall and enduring that the mud and sand that washed off them piled miles high and formed the Catskill mountains. The Appalachians were so mighty that their garbage formed mountains

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Big deal, Americans do the same every day!

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- Dammit! I am sleep deprived and grumpy, but you got a good chuckle out of me... Thanks.
  
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- Ok yeah this was good
  
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Isn't Appalachia part of the Andes too, or are they unrelated?

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- Completely unrelated. North and south america wern't attached when the appalachians were tall. The Andes are formed by an ocean plate (the Nazca plate) dragging as it is sucked under south america. They are tall, and still growing taller.
  
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- Unlikely, the Andes are newer.
  
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- No, the Andes are part of the American Cordillera, which also includes the Sierra Nevada and Sierra Madre and has to do with the Pacific Plate/Ring of Fire
  
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As a geologist who works in the Appalachians... They're cool af.

Nothing is more surreal than being a geologist. Just today I was standing on a dirt road in the middle of farmers field. Looking at the ground is an innocuous little outcrop of boring looking rocks. But those rocks erupted at the bottom of a back arc basin off the coast of Laurentia, was buried by ocean sediment for ages, had an entire ISLAND of rock thrust onto it, and then buried 10s of kilometers deep. The history one rock can tell is amazing.

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You must be fun at parties

No, like for real. People getting excited about what they do is the best.

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As a non-geologist living next to Lake Diefenbaker (the reservoir formed by damming the South Saskatchewan River), I also like geological history.

I have a standard reply for when I'm asked why we chose to move to this "treeless wasteland". "I look out at the flat horizon and see how the glaciers planed the earth the way a woodworker flattens a board. I look around me at the river breaks and see how the meltwater from retreating glaciers carved the earth away into shapes that defy imagination." I don't know accurate any of that is, but it fits my mental model of what I was taught in high school.

(What we call the river breaks are twisted and braided networks of coulees, some with sides so steep as to require mountaineering equipment. Most still run with meltwater in the spring.)

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I have started daydreaming of a career change to geology. There are just so many unanswered questions and its not like space or physics were these questions are tinyor super far away. You can just walk upto a geologic puzzle and hit it with a hammer.

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- Ever heard of Geophysics? :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophysics
  
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- "this rock tastes like.... History."
  
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- Unfortunately geology jobs that aren't working for the oil and gas industries are few and far between.
  
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At their highest it was estimated that the Appalachians were comparable to the Himalayas, with the potential for multiple Everest height mountains along the chain.

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They are also only half of the original mountain range, which was split when pangaea split apart.

The other half is now resting across europe, I think along the northern range.

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- The scottish highlands are the continuation of the appalachians. Those long striations you can easily see on heightmaps is pretty much the most easily noticeable features of both ranges.
  
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This is because thats basically the upper limit for how tall a mountain can be on this planet.

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- What's the limiting factor? I assume it's something with gravity?
  
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Almost heaven, West Virginia

Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River

Life is old there, older than the trees

Younger than the mountains, growin' like a breeze

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Never thought about the song that way...

Wow.

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I always wanted to hear the original version where he sings about how they strip mined all of that away for the coal and it now looks like something out of Mad Max.

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And that is the scientific reason the Appalachians are haunted as hell.

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We worship the Old Gods in them there hills.

https://www.oldgodsofappalachia.com/

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- Was thinking of this pod while reading the post. So good
  
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- As someone who reads much more than listens to podcasts, I've wanted to get into this series for years now, but it feels like I never have enough time, especially as I'm not sure my wife would be onboard with the idea of an audio serial.
  
  Then again, it is spooky season, so now's the time to pitch it, I guess. Any suggestions for diving in for a podcast novice who has a negligible commute and small kids at home? My kids are not sheltered but any stretch, but are probably too young for eldritch horror.
  
  Edit: really, it's the same issue I have with Critical Role; it sounds great to me, but finding enough time on my own to be able to get into it is way harder than reading a book.
  
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I'm not really a science person, but that was super cool to read!

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I’m not really a non-science-person person, but I’m glad u appreciated it.

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And by "enjoy them while you can" it really means "your life will elapse millions of times over before they're gone"

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I had to look if this was posted in Science Memes or RPG Memes.

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One thing that will never seem to leave my head is that I had read that the current mountain tops of the Appalachians are actually the original valleys of the mountain range. The mountains were so old and large that the valleys of todays Appalachian’s were the footprint of what was once maybe the largest mountain range earth has seen

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What we see now are the ancient roots. Before the continental colision, there was a sea and subduction zone. This gave us sandstones, diorite, and granite... All of which were crushed at incredible pressure and temperature by the continental collision. At the deep roots of the mountains, this transformed the rock into gneiss, marble, and other extremely hard rock. Additionally, the forces were so great that the very bottom melted and became fresh granite.

All of these stones are very hard and resistant to erosion, and are what we see todayas the Appalachians

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I think they were as tall as the Alps are now - because the crust essentially "floats" on the mantle as mountains are eroded (and glaciers slide off), the land gradually rises

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- https://www.brown.edu/news/2016-11-21/appalachians :)) so cool, i love science so much
  
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I love the amount of praise in these comments. My dad is a geologist and used to always gush about the Appalachians when I was growing up

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Also, they got moonshine.

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Das rite.

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Appreciate the Appalachians adequately, alright?

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I'm by the river Meuse in Wallonie, which still cuts through the Ardennes, another end of same old mountain range as the Appalachians, continuously eroding while mountains uplifted (just as Indus and Brahmaputra cut through Himalayas now), before the Atlantic ocean existed. Makes you think about time, pity schools don't teach this stuff.

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The Rockies and most of the mountain ranges on the west coast were formed from the erosion of the Appalachian mountains!

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What?

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- https://www.uh.edu/nsm/news-events/stories/2018/0723-geologic-history.php
  
  Basically sediment from the Appalachian region was deposited by ancient rivers and wind currents, with this sediment later being uplifted and then eroded to form the Rockies.
  
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https://www.cntraveler.com/story/appalachian-mountains-may-have-once-been-as-tall-as-the-himalayas

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https://www.cntraveler.com/story/appalachian-mountains-may-have-once-been-as-tall-as-the-himalayas

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Permanently Deleted

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You didn't queue up twice when they were handing out verbal reasoning skills..

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- Mountains.age !> dinosaurs.age, thus mountains.age <= dinosaurs.age
  
  mountains.age > bones.age
  
  So dinosaurs.age => mountains.age > bones.age
  
  And dinosaurs.age > bones.age
  
  His logical reasoning skills are sound though, as is his sarcastic humor.
  
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Dang I didn't even notice that logical inconsistency until you pointed it out. It should say "The mountains aren't just older than dinosaurs."

Of course you're getting downvoted to hell because everyone either didn't slow down to read it more carefully or can't understand sarcasm.

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- Permanently Deleted
  
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- The other reason I was initially confused, but reading this thread helped, is that by presence of bones in the cave they don't just mean that there aren't any bones lying around, brought in by cavemen or bears dying in the cave. They imply that the cave is basically not accessible normally and what would be found in it (bones, fossils etc), if there was anything, can only come from the time when those mountains were formed. I think... Maybe that was obvious for some people.
  
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- The original sentence is consistent with the assertion that the mountains had formed before the first boney ancestors of dinosaurs evolved. This is also consistent with the presented timeline.
  
  The correction would mean that the mountains may be older or younger than dinosaurs, because they are only older than bones, and the article is deafeningly silent on the issue of whether dinosaurs had bones.
  
  It's a failure of literacy on the poster's part, hence the downvotes.
  
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All dinosaurs may have bones, but not all bones are from dinosaurs.

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- This is not the poster is pointing out.
  
  It's basically two booleans that don't go together
  
  Is the mountains older than the dinosaurs = false
  
  Is the mountains older than bones = true
  
  They should both be true, but the writer had the first be false, hence leading to all dinosaurs being boneless. I guess it's a colloquialism in the English language, otherwise all y'all wouldn't had downvote the poster for being pedantic
  
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They didn't. The bone like structures inside of dinosaurs are called fossils, and they're closer to rock than bone

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