Tectonic Plate Activity: The Rocky Mountain Chain

In the northwest corner of New Mexico, in the high desert rangeland and foothills of the Rocky Mountains is the small town I grew up in, Aztec, New Mexico. Not too much stands out in this town; ranches and homesteads mostly failed and died in the mid 1900’s due to the rise of the oil and gas industry that surrounds it. Today that market is very fragile today fluctuating back-and-forth from good to poor staggering the employment rate as the market changes. This, I believe, lends to a terrible the lack of cultural diversity; most of the population in that area can be divided into three groups Caucasian, Hispanic, and Native American.

So you now know how sedimentary rocks are formed and how the Colorado River majorly eroded all the rock creating canyons. But here comes the million dollar question: where did all the rocks come from? The answer to that question is The Continental Drift. The Earth's continents are not fixed in place, but rather float on a sea of molten rock, meaning that they move around quite a bit. Over 250 million years, that “quite a bit” can turn into land masses moving thousands of miles. Moreover, the Earth is made up of 20 Tectonic plates. Seven of these plates are very large and consist of entire continents or sea floors. The plate that the Grand Canyon is located on is called “The North American Plate”. At one time, this plate was considerably further south and consequently had a very different climate than

Mt. Rainer is located in Washington, US on the North American Continent. More specifically it can be found at 46.8523° N, 121.7603° W. Ashford is the closest city to Mt. Rainer. Mt. Rainer was formed by the Juan de Fuca plate and the North American Plate. This plate boundary is convergent in nature, the Juan de Fuca plate is submerged beneath the North American Plate. Mt. Rainer is a stratovolcano, they are characterized by periodically active composite volcanoes. Mt. Rainers lava has alternated between explosive and nonexplosive lava over the past million years. The lava is andesite and dacite lava. Its eruptions are explosive and nonexplosive. At one point in the past it had an explosive eruption that blew off the top of the peak. No ash is shot out of the volcano at the time of eruptions,

estled between the Blue Ridge Mountains and Allegheny Mountains, Rockingham County is located within the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Originally founded in 1778, Rockingham County has become a historical community committed to implementing an economic strategy of attracting new business and industry that are compatible with the way of life in the Shenandoah Valley and assisting in the retention and expansion of existing companies (Rockingham County). Most commonly known for its beauty, Rockingham County is comprised of six metropolitan cities, of which Harrisonburg holds the county seat (Rockingham County).

As I looked out the window, I saw walls of rocks all over the place. I also saw a lot of good rock exposure on the top of the mountain where the rock was to steep for the snow to stick to. You will notice that Mount Baker has an abundance of all sorts of rocks. From the rocks I examined I observed a lot of extrusive igneous rock, metamorphic rock and sedimentary rocks and you will find few places where you can walk continuously from shale or basalt into well-metamorphosed gneiss (Tabor & Haugerud). I observed rocks such as gabbro, shale, and types of extrusive and intrusive igneous rock such as basalt. The ages of the rocks range from about as old as the mountain, which is about 140,000 years old.

Three mountain ranges make up the first region: Rocky, Olympic, and Cascade mountains. The Rocky Mountains are known as the Columbia mountains and are in the Northeast region. They have scenic valleys and ridges where minerals like gold and silver are found. The Olympic mountains are in the northwestern corner of Washington. These mounts are comprised of the highest peaks in the Coastal Range and are great for camping sites as it is in a wilderness. Some parts of the Olympic mountains have never been explored yet! The Cascade mountains are located east of the Puget Sound Lowlands and include several volcanic peaks, like Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helen. Lush forests and glaciers are just some of the amazing features in the Cascade Mountain ranges. In close, the Rocky,

primates were able to migrate from Asia to North America 56 million years ago because of huge volcanic eruptions, which released an ample amount of greenhouse gases leading up to an intense period of global warming. Because of this, the vegetation of North America began to change. The cool forests turned into tropical rain forests who kept their leaves all year round so they can provide food and shelter for these primates, allowing them to migrate to North America. At About 70 million years ago, a piece of earth’s crust under the Pacific Ocean dove down under North America making it rise creating the Rocky Mountains. As the Rocky’s continued to rise, the land under the inland sea was forced up and all of the water drained into what is now

I am thinking of settling on the he frontier (either the Great Plains or the Intermountain West). The Great Plains region includes the states like Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Whereas the Intermountain West composed the northern parts of New Mexico and Arizona, parts of eastern California and western regions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, as well as the non-coastal eastern regions of Oregon and Washington and all of Idaho, Utah, and Nevada. The key difficulties I would face living here would are the temperature are raising here where there would be high demand of water and energy which would leads to create problem in development, farmers in agriculture and supply of light

A period of volcanism resulted in igneous intrusions within the Raton Basin-Sierra Grande Uplift Province that was sourced from the upper mantle about 26. 6 billion years ago and is associated with parallel dikes and sills (Higley, 2007). Igneous rocks are common within the Raton Basin and include Tertiary dikes and sills that range in age from 6.7 to 29 5 million years ago (Flores and Bader, 1999). One of the main differences between dikes and sills is that dikes are longer lived magma conduits and sills are features that form when magma is in neutral buoyancy with the surrounding rock (Rooper et al., 2006). These volcanic events are associated with hydrothermal alteration of coal within the basin (Higley, 2007).

Appalachia is a vast cultural and geographical region “that follows the spine of the Appalachian Mountains from southern New York to northern Mississippi. It includes all of West Virginia and parts of 12 other states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.”4 The distinctive Appalachian culture is a result of the blend of unique backgrounds -Native American (primarily Cherokee), Celtic (mainly Scotch and English), Polish and German, and African American- and the geographical isolation that is revealed through their traditional arts and crafts, music, food, customs, and sometimes dialect.14 This isolation created “a greater

A complex setting of snow-covered alpine highlands, sandstone rock foundations, waterless deserts, river canyons, Colorado is blessed with all these natural formations. Colorado is one of the three states in America wherein its boundary size were measured by using only the latitude and longitude lines. The other two states were Utah and Wyoming. Composing the Colorado is its 51 high mountaintops.

Artists and scientists are subtle and devoted in depicting the nature of reality. Innovation in the architecture scenes have been greatly driven by the advancements in science and technology such as the Pont du Gard. For a building to be certified living, it was required for it to produce the amount of energy it consumed yearly and to capture rain water for all its use in 12months. Painters in the 19th century were faced with a situation that endangered nature itself. A painter by the name Albert Bierstadt painted The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak that caused a mass thrill that associated the canvas with the wealth of the natural resources. His paintings made the congress study geological features and mineral resources along the transcontinental

The Appalachian Mountains are a mountain range in the eastern part of North America. The origin of the mountain ranges name came about when “Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his crew were exploring the Florida coast in 1528, they found a Native American town with a name they transliterated as Apalachen. The word ‘Apalachen’ was also applied to an inland mountain range, and through the course of time it became applied to the entire range and its spelling was changed” (“Appalachian Mountains”).

Rocky Mount, North Carolina acts as an inhabitant of two of North Carolina’s 100 counties, Nash and Edgecombe. The various drugs available to the citizens of this city range from illegal prescription pills to harder, synthetic drugs such as Heroin. Though each drug relates to one another regardless of legal status, there are also levels of legality, relating to penalties as well. Some of the concerns in which Heroin is focused include areas such as the history of Heroin within the location, drug raids, arrests, age range of involvement, and treatment availability. Each category being explored plays a larger role than just the individual components, where the multiple instances create a growing epidemic among the city’s population.

The Appalachian Mountains spans from the state of Georgia all the way through the maritime within the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Eastern portions of Quebec. The land is primarily made up of sedimentary rock that was lifted up and folded, because of the collision of North America with Europe and northern Africa during the formation of Pangaea, creating mountains. These sheets of sedimentary rock are wealthy in non-metallic minerals such as coal. In addition, volcanic action and faulting formed igneous and metamorphic rock in specific space in the Appalachians. Plateaus made of this rock carry metallic material, because of this such as iron and zinc. Many land forms that may located here are