By James Haught
Even if you’ve lived all your life in Appalachia, the immensity of the mountains still can be awesome.
Last week I drove down the turnpike to Beckley, then east on I-64 to the Shenandoah Valley, and the colossal convolutions were as boggling as ever.
Looming peaks and slopes were especially impressive with October sunshine sparkling on the red-orange-yellow forest. But the crests are as gigantic in any season. They dwarf human activity along the roadways, making it seem trivial, transient.
By our brief standard — the outlook that considers the Roman Empire ancient — the mountains are eternal. They stood long before pre-Indians hunted mammoths by the rivers. They’ll stand long after our generation is as forgotten as the mammoth-hunters. But to geologists, mountains are just temporary changes.
Around White Sulphur Springs, the strata of roadside cliffs tilt almost on end, and some rock layers twist like pretzels. Obviously, the crust of the planet ruptured in the far past. Signs advertising limestone caverns in Greenbrier County remind us that this land once was an ocean bed. Seashell deposits filled the sedimentary rock with lime, which slowly dissolved to leave caves.
The scenic drive spurred me to find a plate tectonics book and restudy how the Appalachians were born. Here’s the explanation by Walter Sullivan, science editor of The New York Times, in his 1984 volume, Landprints:
Earth’s surface is fragmented into enormous plates that move perpetually, impelled by currents in the semi-molten interior and by lava extruding from cracks in ocean floors. The North American plate, for instance, moves westward about two inches a year. That may seem insignificant, but consider the vastness of geologic time: In a million years, the continent might travel 30 miles — and in 100 million years, 3,000 miles.
More than 1 billion years ago, Sullivan says, eastern North America crunched against an unknown land mass in what scientists call the Grenville collision. Then the masses separated, opening the prehistoric Atlantic Ocean, which existed for hundreds of millions of years before closing again.
Around 500 million years ago, North America began crushing toward the European and African plates. During the approach, great sections of ocean floor several miles thick broke upward and thrust over the Eastern Seaboard. Volcanos sprouted in the region. Then the western edge of Africa jammed into North America, buckling and crumpling the zone from Maine to Georgia.
“It is hard to imagine deformation on so huge a scale,” Sullivan wrote. “Some folds were pushed completely over on their sides so that older layers lay over younger ones. The result was a mighty mountain range, largely built of sea-floor slabs…. In the final stages of the great collision, sheets of sedimentary rock on the Appalachian Plateau were shoved farther and farther west, some of them almost as far as the Ohio River.”
This gargantuan compression formed West Virginia’s coal from deep bogs of peat left by decayed vegetation.
“It was Africa’s final push from the east that helped complete the requirements for fossil fuel maturation,” Sullivan said. “This was the Alleghenian phase, between 230 and 280 million years ago.”
Amazingly, the Appalachians originally rose perhaps eight miles high — compared to today’s mile-high peaks. Erosion at a rate of about one foot every 4,000 years gradually lowered the crests, and cut valleys in softer material.
While the mountain range was aging and shriveling, North America was separating from Europe and Africa. Lava rising through a long fault spread the floor of the new Atlantic Ocean, century by century, millenium by millenium.
As North America moved westward, the newer Rocky Mountains were created from Pacific island chains scooped up by the plate advancing “like a continent-sized bulldozer,” Sullivan wrote.
All this, according to the best scientific evidence, is how West Virginia came to be a topsy-turvy land — a place of rugged vistas and sparse population — a place too jumbled to be overrun entirely by shopping malls, subdivisions and office complexes, like the rest of America.
The wild tumult may not be commercially advantageous, but it has a beauty and majesty that affect the soul. The psyche of mountain people is marked by their surroundings.
“Mountaineers always love their country,” Napoleon said.
He was right.
—
*Associates and resources listing last updated May 31, 2020.*
Canadian Atheist Associates: Godless Mom, Nice Mangoes, Sandwalk, Brainstorm Podcast, Left at the Valley, Life, the Universe & Everything Else, The Reality Check, Bad Science Watch, British Columbia Humanist Association, Dying With Dignity Canada, Canadian Secular Alliance, Centre for Inquiry Canada, Kelowna Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists Association.
—
Other National/Local Resources: Association humaniste du Québec, Atheist Freethinkers, Central Ontario Humanist Association, Comox Valley Humanists, Grey Bruce Humanists, Halton-Peel Humanist Community, Hamilton Humanists, Humanist Association of London, Humanist Association of Ottawa, Humanist Association of Toronto, Humanists, Atheists and Agnostics of Manitoba, Ontario Humanist Society, Secular Connextions Seculaire, Secular Humanists in Calgary, Society of Free Thinkers (Kitchener-Waterloo/Cambridge/Guelph), Thunder Bay Humanists, Toronto Oasis, Victoria Secular Humanist Association.
—
Other International/Outside Canada Resources: Allianz vun Humanisten, Atheisten an Agnostiker, American Atheists, American Humanist Association, Associação Brasileira de Ateus e AgnósticoséééBrazilian Association of Atheists and Agnostics, Atheist Alliance International, Atheist Alliance of America, Atheist Centre, Atheist Foundation of Australia, The Brights Movement, Center for Inquiry (including Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science), Atheist Ireland, Camp Quest, Inc., Council for Secular Humanism, De Vrije Gedachte, European Humanist Federation, Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations, Foundation Beyond Belief, Freedom From Religion Foundation, Humanist Association of Ireland, Humanist International, Humanist Association of Germany, Humanist Association of Ireland, Humanist Society of Scotland, Humanists UK, Humanisterna/Humanists Sweden, Internet Infidels, International League of Non-Religious and Atheists, James Randi Educational Foundation, League of Militant Atheists, Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, National Secular Society, Rationalist International, Recovering From Religion, Religion News Service, Secular Coalition for America, Secular Student Alliance, The Clergy Project, The Rational Response Squad, The Satanic Temple, The Sunday Assembly, United Coalition of Reason, Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics.
—
About Canadian Atheist
Canadian Atheist is an independent blog with multiple contributors providing articles of interest to Canadian atheists, secularists, humanists, and freethinkers.
Canadian Atheist is not an organization — there is no membership and nothing to join — and we offer no professional services or products. It is a privately-owned publishing platform shared with our contributors, with a focus on topics relevant to Canadian atheists.
Canadian Atheist is not affiliated with any other organization or group. While our contributors may be individually be members of other organizations or groups, and may even speak in an official capacity for them, CA itself is independent.
For more information about Canadian Atheist, or to contact us for any other reason, see our contact page.
—
About Canadian Atheist Contributors
Canadian Atheist contributors are volunteers who provide content for CA. They receive no payment for their contributions from CA, though they may be sponsored by other means.
Our contributors are people who have both a passion for issues of interest to Canadian atheists, secularists, humanists, and freethinkers, and a demonstrated ability to communicate content and ideas of interest on those topics to our readers. Some are members of Canadian secularist, humanist, atheist, or freethought organizations, either at the national, provincial, regional, or local level. They come from all walks of life, and offer a diversity of perspectives and presentation styles.
CA merely provides our contributors with a platform with almost complete editorial freedom. Their opinions are their own, expressed as they see fit; they do not speak for Canadian Atheist, and Canadian Atheist does not speak for them.
For more information about Canadian Atheist’s contributors, or to get in contact with any of them, or if you are interested in becoming a contributor, see our contact page.
—
Image Credit: James Haught.