Week 5 - Converging Plates, Appalachian Mountains

It was early spring, one year, when I decided to solo-hike the Appalachian Trail – the entire trail.  I decided on a south-to-north thru-hike starting in Georgia at Springer Mountain.  By mid-summer I had made it as far as Pennsylvania and was deep in the Appalachian Mountains.  It was here that I stopped for an extended rest to ponder the origin of these beautiful mountains.

In preparation for my hike, I had read many things, including information on the United States Geological Survey website, that described the Appalachian Mountains being formed by an early North American plate colliding with an adjacent oceanic plate from the East.  The oceanic plate began to sink creating an opposing thrust plate. This new subduction zone brought with it volcanoes, further enhancing the thrust plate composed of sandstone and limestone.  As this North American plate continued to thrust upward the resulting Appalachian Mountains were created.  These mountains were the result of the Alleghanian Orogeny. Further erosion on the exposed up-thrust was evidenced by streams depositing rock debris into the lowlands, creating deep canyons in the bedrock.  Continued compression stress over the years, in this otherwise passive plate margin, has created multiple folds in the relatively soft sedimentary layers of rock and is evidenced by the undulating mountains and valleys which showcase the anticline and syncline geological theories (https://geomaps.wr.usgs.gov/parks/province/appalach.html).

                                                    Appalachian Valley Province with

                                                    compression stress folds near the 
                                                    town of Sunbury, PA, east of the 
                                                    Susquehanna River

                                                    Photo credit:  USGS

I thought about this explanation briefly and decided not to believe the USGS statement of Appalachian Mountain origin, choosing instead to believe that an Almighty God created this mountain range by His own power whether it be from a Great Flood or some other means.

As I reached the end of the Appalachian Trail that fall in Maine at Mount Katahdin, I was firmly convinced that all explanation for the beauty of the mountains I had just hiked through should be given to a supreme Creator and not some happenstance shifting of plates on the Earth’s crust.