One can only admire the way the Chicxulub crater is depicted here: kind of a teadrop shape at first, running from southwest to northeast (as a result of the impact at a shallow angle), then transforming into a progressively round shape; its rims at first colored black (probably to show they were charred), then fading to "normal" color; finally, the whole thing fades into the sea as a result of erosion. Congratulations on creating such a great animation with such a level of attention to detail!
Impact craters are round, round, round, whatever the angle, just look at the moon for an example. Deformations might come from the projection used here
At one time I lived at what would have been the western end of that seaways and these days the prroximate elevation is about 5000 feet above sea level.
Part of the water for the Interior Seaway and other ocean intrusions came from uplift at the speafing centers. The rest came from the lack of continental ice caps. Even today we have large areas that are interior seaways. The Java Sea for one.
I really enjoy your plate tectonics videos. It's fascinating to see how the face of the the earth has changed over hundreds of millions of years. Thank you for posting these so we can learn more about the history of Earth.
WOW? I did not know that this is how North America was born, I'm amazed of what this person did with animation is great for teachers to show students this i-tube in geography class. Many Thanks for putting this together.
Today I live on the western shore of the uplifted and fractured bottom of the Cache Creek Sea. My house sits on ground that used to be in some tropical part of the West Pacific, and is now in Washington State. When I was in high school, nobody had any idea of this. What a world!
And in northern Australia, there is land that probably part of WA state. I live on the Kitsap and it's fascinating and awesome to think of how much of the state is actually exotic terrane. And that the Columbia River Basalt Group is not only the work of the Yellowstone Hotspot but that the hotspot itself used to be underneath Vancoiuver Island/Olympic Peninsula at one time (about 50,000,000 years ago).
This is wonderful! In Washington State, the paleo joke is that the West Coast is the "new coast" because everything west of Montana immigrated :) I hadn't realize how big the central internal sea was - that the whole continent was completely separated - nor that "Florida" essentially retracted and then came back out again. Thank you for this!
He just didn' start it early enough, back in the Silurian we had some nice sea coast and beautiful reefs across the northern third of the state. I'm not quite old enough to remember them, but when the wooly mammoth were tramping around Fort Wayne, now that was spectacular. And the run-off from that last glacier, even down New Harmony pretty chill......
I like to tell people that this (I'm in Virginia) was once the center of the earth! because it was basically the suture line between N. America and Gondwanaland that formed Pangea. I'm a little confused on the age though, some of the rocks in the Appalachians are a Billion years old, but maybe are exposed plutons from erosion.
I like that this simulation focuses only on North America. It omits other areas of the world which could be distracting in order to see the detail of N.A. I also like that the ice age that created the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay was included. It gives a more layered story of the evolution of the continent.
I grew up in central southern BC near the town called Cash Creek. Just west of there there is a whole mountain of salt water clam fossils This hill is now about 4000 feet in elevation and roughly half way between the Rocky Mountains and the BC COAST, interesting.
The movement is probably fairly accurate. Only small pieces of the actual positions of landmasses is probably accurate. We just don't know what most of it actually looked like. However, this video is extremely interesting and gives a good overall picture of what happened. Good job.
I did learn in one vids that one of the markers of the original west coast of the Old North American body is the Belt group, named after the Big and Little Belt Mts in Montana, As the Little Belts are between Bozeman and Helena, not far outside Bozeman, and one of the nifty features at the east end of the Little Belts is the HOrseshoe Hills, this is fun, because one of the main features of the Horseshoe Hills is the massive beds of trilobite fossils, which are basically prehistoric ancestors of the modern horseshoe crab (thus the name for the range of hills). As Bozeman is close enough to Yellowstone that as a kid we used to, in summer, regularly go into Yellowstone for Sunday drives/picnics, that is how far inland the old core of the continent is.
Looks great! Only I am missing Siletzia, which formed about 55 - 49 ma. ago (if I recall correctly) and 'docked' partly at the west coast of Washington and partly at Alaska about 50 - 45 ma. ago. Or wasn't I paying attention?
It’s there but not labelled. You can see it fill in the big divot on the West Coast around 50 mya as a piece of it floats north (Yakutat.) It might be that there is a lot of stuff going on there about that time. I would have liked to see it in final coloration by 55 mya, but its not my video.
Interesting to see how “last minute”, geologically speaking, Florida appears. It’s such a noticeable feature in North America and yet it wasn’t even there for the vast majority of its historical existence.
@@TomTom-rh5gk You're actually sort of right as I watched it again. At 0:48 in the video or early Jurassic there is a slight bulge in the SE covering northern FL, as the map still shows present boundaries. However, at 1:27 (late Jurassic) we see it disappear and not reappear till 1:51 or early Cretaceous. Then, it's above water only 100 million years while still in the early Cretaceous and poof, it's gone right away at 2:06 in the video. From there it's gone a long amount of geological time until a little over 10 million years ago at 4:23 finally narrowing to its present shape a few hundred thousand years ago. So, all told, out of 200 million years, the bulge on SE North America exists for 50 million years and is under shallow water for 150 million (three quarters of the time). So we're both right ;)
@@bcs2em625 I completely agree :). You are right it does disappear and few times. But Florida seems like it wants to be there. It could be a trick of the mind but it seems like certain features keep coming back. I would love to see you do a video on how Africa keeps its shape and how Huston Bay keeps playing peek a boo. And if you can figure out why that would make a great paper.
Great work! We think to be on a steady situation, but this is only our illusion, a misconception. In reality all is changing continously; nothing is for ever in the universe
Well done, Christopher, I've been looking for a well-done version along these lines. A close-up of the Pacific Coast, specifically the Juan de Fuca plate, would be even cooler. Upcoming seismic activity will make this video even more informative, unfortunately.
I find it fascinating how Cuba and Hispaniola started as mountains off the coast of Mexico and ended up where they are now. Especially when they seemed to have changed order - Cuba north and east of Haiti/Dominican Republic. No wonder they get earthquakes. On other videos that whole small plate looks almost stationary while North and South America head out to the Pacific around it. Too bad the Amazon and Congo rivers never connected to form a massive river (not that the Amazon isn't massive on its own).
The part this video resonates with me the most is: serpentine soil in california and dinosaur ridges in colorado both two facts mention they were under the sea before. but this video clearly shows why that's. the case. good job!
Christopher: A few notes: 1.The Rocky Mountains did not begin to rise up until about 65 MillionYears Ago,...and I said "begin"! 2 Geologists have "discovered that the geology of Southern Alaska matches the Geology of California! As Alaska rolls upward, it drags the coast of North America UPWARD, in a slip-fault along the coast! 3. 60 Million Years Ago South America sat directly along the Pacific Fault in the Southern Pacific! Of course there's more, but, good work.
Can't say that's true, as even before the breakup of Pangea, the West Coast of then America was a coastal Subduction Zone for the Farralon Plate, which Created a Coastal Mountainous range akin to the Andes which was buried into the interior,then eroded away. But which can still be alluded to by Diamond mines in Colorado, the remains of Ancient Volcanic systems eroded beyond the Magma Chambers we still see as the Sierra Nevadas of California.
@@Deebz270 Like you have every square inch of the planet memorized and you didn't need a map or a globe because you read it in a book... Give me a break. You don't even know the meaning of the term "plate tectonics" Your comment is an admission that you stole the images and you don't know where anything is.
Would be interesting extra material, I agree. Always love to see more of this process. NICK Z with Central Wash.Univ, has several great lectures you may enjoy.
@@valoriel4464 Thanks! I am already a big fan of his. You message made me realize that he keeps it real in the sense he connects past geological events with modern geological features we can see today.
Very nice, but as you are centered on North America for this sequence, perhaps using a spherical projection centered on about 40'N, rather than Mercator projection that distorts the northern reaches.
Hey Christopher I really enjoy your work. Thank you for posting these videos. I am however curious about the nature of the boundary of the Eurasian and the North American plates in N.E. Siberia. Are they diverging, converging or slipping past one another? On most maps they are either at the edge of the map or not clearly defined. I would love to hear your opinion.
Always amazing. New for me was the northern latitudes moving west to create Alaska. Also, my home state of Michigan was rifting apart before 80 Mya. Then after it is being shoved back together.
Watching exactly how much the earth has changed over so long a period of time makes you wonder how they find anything that old. The was land, it moved, there was water, then new land, then things got a bit squishy......
The land that gets squishy is partly preserved in uneroded mountains and land rocks. There are some ways to tell how old it was and where it might have come from.
What a load of nonsense about the continents floating about. Consider the more plausible "Expanding Earth Theory" that all the continents came together on a planet one-quarter it's current size.
items to add to this animation that would cool. locations of select cities on the continent (for reference) as well as Yellowstone Hotspot as it moved across the west coast into Northern America (because there are several old calderas still in existence)
What happened between 80-70, where did all that land come from? The plate rebounded? I love how the ice age that created the landscape we currently see is just a blink of an eye.
That's awesome. I have to admit I have a hard time wrapping my mind around deep time. Just something species living relatively unchanged for millions of years coupled with the vast changes that we have had on the planet over the past 250 years that boggles my mind. The species that mankind has driven into extinction versus species that survived for hundreds of thousands or millions of years. A million years or 10,000 generations each living to age 100 is quite the concept to grasp and that's just a sliver in the age of the Earth.
So long ago and scotland can be seen,,,i wonder what ayrshire looked like then where my parents home now stands! One of my guilty pleasures listening to classical music and looking at our very, very beautiful planet wax and wane!
