Rocky Mountains Research Paper Example

The article I chose to write about is the Rocky Mountains located on a stretch from Canada to central New Mexico. The Rocky Mountains were affected by the intense plate tectonic movement around 170 to 40 million years ago. It has been said that the Rocky Mountains are a geologic puzzle. This has been said because the Rocky Mountains are hundreds of miles formed by colliding planes. In this informative article I will be examining and explaining how scientifically beautiful the Rocky Mountains are. 

Events that led to the creation 

The Rocky Mountains are quite magnificent in their formation from around 1.7 billion years ago in the Precambrian Era. During this Era, rocks such as schists and genesis were being formed as well as the oldest metamorphic rocks. Recently after this, around 1.6 billion years ago, magma began to push into the older rock, this pressure resulted in Boulder Creek Batholith. Another factor that led to the creation of the Rocky Mountains started in the Paleozoic Era, in which inland seas largely covered the present-day North. The inland seas in turn started to deposit thick layers of marine sediments (which would later turn into sandstone and limestone). A mountain building process which occurred ruffley 285 million years ago raised the Rocky Mountains which were much smaller than the modern Rockies. The ancient rockies began to erode away which caused sediment to be left behind. As a result, the entire state of Colorado as well as much of the middle of North America was underwater. This flooding also resulted in large amounts of sediment depositing creating other sandstone formations. Around 75 million years ago, carrying into the Cenozoic Era, Laramide Orogeny, which was a mountain building event, began. This event then started the process of uplifting the Rocky Mountains you see now. This process was also followed by great amounts of volcanic ash fall and mudflows. Following this, the Tertiary period was impactful in the lifting of the Rocky mountains, as it raised the rocky mountains to its height now and additionally removed significant amounts of sedimentary deposits and revealed the much older basement rocks. 

What’s so weird? 

The Rocky Mountains are a special landform of this vast earth. What makes them so special is something to do with the plate boundary. You see, most mountain ranges form around active tectonic spots where the plates either undergo a convergent plate boundary process, divergent plate boundary process, or transform plate boundary process. But when researching about the Rocky Mountains, they were formed in the middle of an area which is said to be, “... mostly inactive continental interior away from the plate boundary”. It was not expected that a mountain range coming from this sort of area would be as vast and tall as the Rocky Mountains are today. Research done by geologists studying this bizarre event found that during the start of the Laramide Orogeny, a small dense oceanic crust slowly and very shallowly slid under the North American plate. According to an article about the Rocky Mountains written by USGS, “ This shallow subduction angle meant that the Farallon Plate could have reached farther east under the continental interior before plunging deeper into the mantle, releasing water into the lithosphere above.” In turn the water melts, causing magma to then migrate upward into the lithosphere located above the sinking Farallon Plate. The Rocky mountains were then essentially buried by the sedimentary rocks. Erosion which occurred from the glaciers as well as rivers ‘removed thousands of feet of this less robust sediment, leaving behind the hard basement granites and genesis that makes up the core of the Rockies’ says USGS.  This all caused the Rocky Mountains to be so detailed and special. 

In conclusion there is a grave amount of vast detailed information that goes into the creation of the Rocky Mountains. Throughout the research conducted by geologists it was found that the Rockies are formed by igneous and metamorphic material over a great deal of time. There were also many environmental events that led to the lifting of the Rockies such as magma pushing, Inland seas in Colorado, flooding, erosion, etc. In research findings were found that the Rockies are quite different in their formation than other mountains. The meaning of this is that the Rockies were formed on ‘mostly inactive continental interior away from the plate boundaries’.  These factors play into the thought that the Rocky Mountains are a geologic puzzle.