Appalachian Geology: Surprising Implications

Thank you for this amazing video. One thing I'd love to see in the future would be talking about anicent rivers like the Susquehanna and how it would be able to survive and cut through the Appalachians as they formed.

Since fresh springs and water are where Mts are wouldn’t glaciers have some part in this formation of Mts and is how fresh water from the glaciers gets trapped deep down in these processes?

I love geology ... thank you sir.❤

My great grandpa was a cook

Wow what a view.

Wish Myron could have been one of my teachers; I would have pursued geology. His clearly understood style makes you Want to learn !

The "ch" is said like the "ch" in chew, not Chicago. Yes, I'm an ass, but still. I adore the video, though❤️

The Appalachians, and the Scottish Highlands are the same mountain chain.

The Appalachians are older than trees. 100 million years older than land animals.

West Virginia is the only State completely within the Appalachian Mountain range.

Following your example the mantle would be about 800 pages thick.

Why is the Pacific Oceanic plate the same age as the Atlantic Oceanic plate? Wouldn't one be older if Tectonic plates were drifting?

Spent my life as a soldier and now believe I should have been a geologist

What an excellent presentation! Thank you.

Thanks for teaching me about my beautiful Pennsylvania home. Just fascinating Professor. Please keep it up!

Great graphics and explanation of valley and coal/oil/natural gas formation. Thanks

You are a very clear and patient teacher. Thank you for taking the time to construct such informative and exquisite videos.

I love traveling through east Tennessee seeing the tortured, twisted, folded rock layers clearly visible along roadside rock faces.
Take a trip from Bristol, TN/VA to the tourist site Bristol Caverns. Looking at the rock layers go from near horizontal to
vertical clearly shows why the caverns are where they are.

I grew up in NW North Carolina's Brushy Mountains in my old family plantation home. We grew hundreds of acres of apple & peach orchards on the mountainsides surrounding our home. Looked like a paint store was blown up in Spring when the mountain trees bloomed.
BTW Hiddenite, NC was not far away and where my Grandparents lived. My great-grandmother's land once contained all the land of the emerald mines there today. My family grew cotton on that land with such precious stones under their feet they never knew. We used to find massive crystals in fact we found the once largest quartz crystal in North America called the North American quartz. My Great Aunt back in the 1980s displayed it in her museum called The Lucas Mansion in Hiddenite she saved it from being razed restoring it as a local heritage center. We found quartz and emeralds in the creeks on my Paternal family farm. The emeralds were never really big that we naturally found. The rare mineral Hiddenite of course the community was named after as well as emeralds, amethyst, sapphire, aquamarine, topaz, and garnets. I only mention this as you seem to know a lot about minerals.

Man, I've always been interested in geology and always watch in awe of the changing landscape any time I drive in or out of the Appalachians from my home right near the "triple point" between the glacial, plains, and mountain landscapes of Ohio. But your ability to teach this subject just sparked such a deep interest in me, and I want to thank you for that.

It's always been a subject of interest, but this video made me appreciate it so much more and I'll be going on a deep dive because of it. You have a wonderful personality for this and I'm grateful that I chose to watch this. It was an excellent primer on the subject and your excitement and awe is infectious. You'll probably be my number one source of "edutainment" while I work on my little guitar shop for the next few weeks at least.

Thanks again! Very happy I found your channel!

HI. THANK YOU for the great videos. Since it would be to much work to congratulate you every time it is great, I will only do the negative comments, because there is not much to do. With your paper comparisons, you talk as though crust plates were moving around, while you well know that much thicker lithosphere plates do.

Big thanks for showing metric measurements! xd

I asked a Christian Geologist how old the Earth is. No answer yet.
If tectonic plates are lighter, do they "float" and move around on denser material underneath ?

I LOVE YOUR WHITEBOARD EXPLANATIONS!!

I graduated this spring with my BA in Geology and wanted to watch geo vids to keep my mind sharp and you have made so many light bulbs go off!! I love your content and the way you explain concepts/teach so much!

Very interesting dear Myron. Thanks. Of course I will disagree with the subduction process as a massive phenomena if it even exists, the pieces of the puzzle did fit very well together all around and even in the whole pacific and indian basins. That´s already proved beyond doubt in increasingly smaller models of our expanding planet, but most colleagues still do not accept those facts. Nevertheless some subduction might happen in the horizontal and quite a lot seems to happen in the vertical directions after isostasy. I would think about the Appalachia as an old largely (but not completely) disactivated volcanotectonic failure probably similar in some ways to the other side of the continent (Rockies, Sierras Madres, and Andes), might they be? Erosion is quite well advanced on them and they seem to not move too much. However there are differences between the chains, the pacific ring of fire was created much more violently and represents the first massively large oceanic rift, although it seems to have started in a triangular shape still preserved near Asia, it break up in several oceani rifts along time. The American side is interesting, it seems that it got dormant and then started to rise again from the south to the north about 47 mya. Large chunks of continental deep roots could got glued in a certain way to the oceanic floor and as evidences show the floor could be created in just one direction for a long time, but later this can change over. If massive horizontal subduction have been taking place as thought by many (against the laws of physics in buoyancy after isostasy and against walls of continental floor) then the very real facts of the edges of all the continental plates (floors) in 99% of precision would have became impossible in a few hundred million years, but they are there and they fit awesomely. Most subduction is vertical, no massive horizontal subduction is acceptable after the perfect fitting of the plates, the perfect correlation of the rocks in the previously neighboor floors, and after many hundreds of examples of biogeographic patterns that are easily explained after the links between the landmasses in the "somewhat recent" past. There are some implications on old failure systems concerning their souroundings. One very important implication is that weight on the continent creates a sinking of the nearby continental and/or oceanic materials. This creates all the trenches even when no clue on "subduction" could be obtained (it did not even exist as thought). Those deep sediments might be directly related with the same process and the prior activity of the whole chain (Appalachian) might had been much greater. Concerning the depths of the continents, I agree in general but we have to point out that some regions, specially the old volcanotectonic failures as the Pacific Ring, have deep continental roots as observed in seismic tomography, the meeting of large areas of oceanic floor with them is like thinking in a thin 10-20 km oceanic crust could bend and go under a wall of even 45 times its thickness: some areas of the Andes are even over 650 kms deep and lithospheric leaks are conducting a different kind of "subduction" in some places there. A smaller planet would most probably imply much deeper oceans and a complex relation of the epicontinental seas with the crust. If we look closely to the evidences gathered in the last 50 years, we must better accept that the fit is awesome and beyond any possible massive subduction changing its shapes, most geology on Earth is expansionary plate tectonics as also happens in several other objects in the solar system. For instance Ganimedes is well known and explored, but many moons, and other planets show features on the expansive geological history all around. Perhaps we shall rethink the way we see the ancient oceans. After the evidences, Pangea would be just the planetary crust before the massive oceanic spreading started and Panthalassa should necessarily be an epicontinental or almost epicontinental ocean, a deep one if water ammount did not changed a lot "recently". This is a major challenge for geology and biogeography, remap the world´s oceans according to the hardest evidences of perfect match between the sides, and accepting that many other megacontinents thought by some before Pangea were just parts of previous continental planetary crusts, a complex puzzle that was dominated by massive volcanic resurfacement until the rifts brought tranquility to our Earth. Biological clues are also included in the scenario, as well as the percentage of rock types, all fit well the expansionary ideas in marvellous ways. Thanks, M SC. David Brailovsky UNAM Mexico City

Wonderfully well explained

Great discussion Myron. My favorite geology field trip, from Napa California, was to Pt. Reyes California in late '80 in my second year of college. Our unflappable teacher, Bob Beatty took us to the Earthquake trail and later had us hike towards Pt. Reyes Lighthouse, and we saw cliffs just as dramatic as the White Cliffs of Dover which I did not see until I took the Dover-Calais ferry to the European continent for a month long art trip there in '17, then I took the ferry home flying non-stop to Phoenix the next day from Heathrow, flying non-stop to Heathrow on British Airways. In addition to non-stop flights to Frankfurt Germany, Phoenix in time for the Paris Olympics has added a non-stop to Paris--we selfishly call it the friendliest international airport on US soil and I can vouch that we have the friendlest customs agents after perhaps San Francisco near where I was raised.

I loved my visits to the Appalachians, which my career as a tourism instructor took me quite often. I love most their imprint on Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusets but also their imprint around Roanoke VA, where there are many caves, in Tennessee, especially near Townsend, and where North Carolina is.

I accidentally drove into North Carolina on a rainy night trying to get to my client, Advanced Automotive in Roanoke, driving in three nights from Phoenix to get there, so I stopped short of Roanoke on the third night knowing that I, if I get lost, needed a rest.

In all my travels, I have been impressed by mountains that rival those of Jackson Hole Wyoming or Yosemite CA. In the US, just south of Carson City, the Sierra's are as impressive as Jackson Hole. In Switzerland, Lauterbrunnen Valley, which I have hiked many times, rivals the beauty of Yosemite, with the tallest waterfall in all of Europe and a mighty series of indoor cascades that flows into the Valley from the Jungfrau Massif.

I find, in my travels and via geological historians like you, how beautiful raw nature is, that we have been given in our world. All my life, like John Muir and Ansel Adams, i have cherished people, like my parents, their ancestors, wife and daughter, who love and respect this and gave me a civilian life to enjoy given the paternal side and maternal side of my family was not, but the family I adopted by marriage, teachers like I am, chose to live like my parents did after WWII and the Korean War, teaching me about the flora and fauna of our world and allowing me to find schools that would allow me to do the same.

I was just thinking Myron, about England and the foreland basins in the Appalachian. Then my guess is these foreland basins also produced Britain and Polish, and Ukrainian coal. Or is it pretty much the same or different mechanisms?

So is all this red clay we have just eroded volcanic activity?
Under the red clay is often a sandy type layer… then to left 20 feet it’ll be solid granite.
Our rock structure makes a ton os sense to me but the soil composition is still confusing to me.

I was blown away at just how thin the tectonic plates really are seeing your ball and paper scale illustration...thanks

Loved your visual!

Nice job explaining!!

Uncle Jesse meets Bob Ross.
This is education hidden by a great story teller

I want to thank you for your excellent videos. I was an Entomology major and I have learned much from your Geology videos. You are an excellent speaker who remains focused on the subject (i.e. no rambling stories, no showing your dog sniffing around your yard) and you have very useful graphics. Your videos are models for good teaching methods and as such make Geology easily understandable.

I do have a suggestion for a video: WHAT FLATTENED THE OUACHITA MOUNTAINS IN OK AND IN MOST OF TX? The Ouachita Mountains were ONCE a CONTINUOUS RANGE from AR to western TX, as evidenced by the roots of the missing mountains. Now the Ouachita Mountain Range remains only as mountains in AR (Ozark Mountains) and mountains in west TX (Marathon Mountains). As I stated above, I was not a Geology major, so perhaps I am missing an obvious answer to the leveling of the Ouachita Mountains in OK and in most of TX.

1. Please explain how the Ouachita Mountains were eroded to the plains of OK and TX.

2. Please explain why did the erosional forces spare the Ouachita Mountains and the Marathon Mountains?

Myron, this is off topic, but what brand of whiteboard do you use? It erases so cleanly, leaving no ghosting.

Amazing video! Does anyone know where I can get these maps of the phases that North America went through in its past? I'd love to have a set of them❤

I absolutely love your videos sir!

I went to work for a farmer in Hampshire county West Virginia. I would observe people stopping and do some chipping in a shale outcrop that the road was chipped out of. That had ocean critters in the rock. I said how is that we are five hundred mile from the ocean. It bugged and bugged me and then the internet became available. I learned about tectonic plates and their movement. Ant the thousand foot mountains in our area were once ten and twenty foot high. And the narrow valley where our farm was on was miles deep with eroded material. I have since been amazed with the geological history of earth.

That Laurentian image explains a bit about the Reelfot Rift/New Madrid earthquake zone...

😎

another absolutely idyllic place and a super video Myron!

You explained what I did not care to learn at school, so I must add my appreciation for the information, and exuberance Myron.🖖🦘.

It’s hard not to love Myron Cook. He makes you love geology.

What I find most fascinating is that the mountain ranges we have in Germany (excluding Alps) belong to the same range the Appalachians belong to.

hi there!
i live in Norway, and we have part of the Caledonian mountains where i live, pretty similiar to Appalachia, my question is:
is there alot of greenschist in the area?
thanks!

Beautiful!

I know people who have access to this kind of education who think the Earth is a 6 thousand year old frisbee under a glass dome. So glad I know where to learn the truth.