For this week’s travel journal, I chose to stay close to home. I pretty much just looked out my window to the west, here in Colorado, and saw the great Rocky Mountains. These massive peaks, that stretch across the western horizon, are evidence of converging tectonic plates. While I am only seeing a fraction of the great mountain range, as the full range begins in northern Canada and follows an almost straight line south to New Mexico. The Rocky Mountains formed about 80 Million to 55 Million years ago when multiple tectonic plates began to slide underneath or collided with the North American plate. The forces from these two actions, created a thrust fault which had enough force over time to lifted the bedrock high into the sky creating the mountain range. Glacier erosion has also helped to carve the mountains to their present beauty, as the ice cut through the rock and created the valleys and mountain lakes. While like most of the regions in the Southwest part of North America, the Rocky Mountains contain Paleozoic sandstone, limestone and also interbedded with volcanic granites. While most of the folds are created by the thrust fault, the appearance of syncline folds can be viewed in the rock formation of the mountains.
Works
Cited
The Formation of the Rocky Mountains. (2005). Retrieved from MountainNature.com:
http://www.mountainnature.com/geology/platetectonics.htm
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