I was thinking something similar the other day. I was looking at the Rockies (I live in the Denver area) and was thinking about how irrelevant the mountains actually were to the mass of the plates involved. A few wrinkles in that rock is basically nothing, but to us, those mountains are huge.
The previous mountain range that existed where the Rockies currently are was equally irrelevant. They eroded away completely before that bit of plate got pushed up again. (That is most evident in the Red Rocks and Flat Iron formations.)
That is some difficult scale to think about, not only in size, but also in time.
6 Comments
negativenull@piefed.world · 10 pts · 99d
properly cool rock!
janus2@lemmy.zip · 10 pts · 99d
imagine the kind of tectonic force required to say "lol get folded idiot" to several layers of rock
remotelove@lemmy.ca · 11 pts · 99d
I was thinking something similar the other day. I was looking at the Rockies (I live in the Denver area) and was thinking about how irrelevant the mountains actually were to the mass of the plates involved. A few wrinkles in that rock is basically nothing, but to us, those mountains are huge.
The previous mountain range that existed where the Rockies currently are was equally irrelevant. They eroded away completely before that bit of plate got pushed up again. (That is most evident in the Red Rocks and Flat Iron formations.)
That is some difficult scale to think about, not only in size, but also in time.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de · 3 pts · 98d
Power word: SCRUNCH
Jayve@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 99d
Schist and Dike sound like a buddy cop duo.
SharkWeek@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 pts · 99d
dhcmrlchtdj__@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 99d
What did you call me