The 200-Million-Year Formation Of The Rocky Mountains | Spark 

Because of the stress and time pressures involved in being a trucker, I now listen to documentaries as I'm getting ready to soothe my nerves. I found this one so fascinating I just had to actually watch it again while having breakfast a day or so later. I learned about 'island rafting' thrust-faulting and 'compression-scraping' uplifting mountain-building caused by different forms of subduction at either deepening continental edge or shallow mid-continent levels. It basically blew me away. I've been intrigued by mountain-forming, and this answered a lot of my questions. Sedimentary vs Granite mountain ranges - now I know. When you consider that mountains are only creases, relatively, upon the earth when viewed from orbit, it is just mere us that sees them as an enormity. As a semi driver these past 5 years, I've traversed the Rockies thru the I-70 several times, and witnessed the perennial misfortunes of every new batch of winter-uninitiated drivers there. It's that bad, sometimes I'd rather go the long way round up over Wyoming, and that's saying something. But reaching 11,000 feet on the interstate at The Tunnel, and diving deep within Glen Canyon is breathtaking. I also have an answer now for all those basalt beds lining the I-40 highway over by Grants down in New Mexico too - only 1500 years ago, from the Rift's long river of lava, confirming how recent it looks! Thank you so much, for blowing my mind. 💜

I bet there are geologists that would strongly disagree with the southern Rockies formation. Nick Zentner would have something to say about this for sure.

I'm so entranced by any discussion of the Rockies' Front Range, because it was my playground in the 1950s! Every summer my cousins and neighborhood buddies would ride our bikes up to Red Rocks and climb around the jagged hills we see in this video's description of the beautiful folded uplift. And to the east, the Great High Plains of North America fanned out, still layering from eroded silt carried down by the Platte and the Arkansas Rivers, and carried south by the Rio Grande, west by the mighty Colorado. It was a magical place to be an eight-year-old. Thank you for bringing my childhood, and Colorado's own childhood, to life!

Finally! A documentary that really explains EXACTLY how mountains form. I have never been able to quite understand it, always thought some sudden giant earthquake made them. Thanks a LOT.

We were told in our geology classes in the 1980s because of ice core recorfs the earb was in up temperature cycle, that we could warm untill the down temperature cycle was estimated to begin in 5000-8000 years.

Yosemite is in California, not the Rocky Mountains. You keep showing images of Yosemite.

I live in the Canadian Rockies, and Im a photographer and a hiking guide. Love educating people on the history and the formation of the mountains and the fossils found here

More of this please, I love geology!

That really works good, at 74, for seeing how the mountains formed.

Silly background "music" always gets in the way of good information.

Even more amazing than the Rocky Mountains is the music that seems to come from them.

There were at least five separate instances in this video that showed Half Done in Yosemite National Park in CA, USA. That mountain range is the Sierra Nevada which is hundreds of miles away from the Rocky Mountains. All these scientists and their assistants and yet you video guys got that totally wrong multiple times. So what else is wrong in your video? Otherwise I really enjoyed it.

Flat slabs subduction is the company line but there is another Hypothesis Yeh I watched Nick Zentner How the Rockies formed There is a debate on this I am just learning this and I am far from being an expert I am at a 101 Geology student One of the things I have learned is a lot of land was added to the west coast

Amazing and mesmerising

Enjoyed this. My undergrad was geology (went on to planetary science) and yes, you left out a lot important and curious facts about the rockies, but at least I am sure time demands did that. Actually with the really good images/graphics I would like to see what you could do in like a 5 hour tectonics of North America. From the North Slope to the join with South America. Think you could really help out those of us who have taught basic tectonics and/or geology of North America

Now I want a similar and even more detailed one for the Great Himalayan Range!

I was searching such a video! Thank you for filming this. I like geology. I'd like to visit some of those magnificent places in US and see it and touch it. Btw I am watching you from Russia

"The older I get, the better this works." 😂 I feel ya!

If you're thinking the Rocky Mountains were lifted in increments of a few feet, maybe it would take "200 million years", but the mountains show no such traces. They went up in a matter of a couple of lifts, maybe three, maybe four, but not anything less than hundreds of feet at a time. I suspect the entire process lasted little more than a matter of months, scattered over a couple centuries, probably not more than 5,000 years ago, to the first jump. None of Earth's largest mountain ranges, the Cordillera, the Himalayas, the Alps, existed before that, in anything close to their present splendor.

Geology is a fun study with differing folks having differing pieces of information each thinking their piece is right. Just enjoy what we see today.

43:11 PowerBook G4... this episode must be from around 2001-2005

Music is too loud and overpowers the narrator

If it splits apart right where they show it I'll have ocean front property. WOOHOO

Phenomenal American landscapes and nature! Cheers from Europe 😃

What if the Rio Grande Rift connects to the failed rift zone under the Great Lakes? I would imagine the path of least resistance and slicing through the granite in Montana would be hard. It'll curve under Colorado and make its way towards the weakened fractures that already exist from the failed mid continent rift. Just a theory. :)

Thanks so far interesting !

Although Chomsky has made many accurate and insightful points, the notion that we should be apathetic toward the goal of progress is not a reasonable conclusion. Moving forward is mostly incremental and involves making choices between imperfect options. When people show up and make distinctions between competing arguments, movement toward progress occurs. We will see revolutionary changes when it’s time, and constant evolution if we engage with awareness.

Pretty good if you like Canada, Red Rocks and New Mexico. How about the other ranges in the Colorado Rockies?

Soooooo we have no idea how the mountains formed. Also, anybody else ever wonder why Pangea only takes place on half the planet???

Rather than the angle of subduction changing just because, isn't it likely that something like a thrust fault occurred in the subducted plate? That would cause the uplift of the basement further from the plate boundary, wouldn't it? Curious.

Pretty good for a non geology channel, looks to have been professionally made. I get a feeling this is at least a decade old as the science has come a long way from here with a major geological paradigm revolution in terms of how tectonic plates work namely all plates are oceanic with continents rising on them like a raft or gigantic iceberg of buoyant material. Though as covered by Nick Zentner's Baja BC A to Z livestream series we now have pretty strong evidence that these landmasses that North America hit were actually a series of mature volcanic arcs that had formed out in the Panthalassan ocean off the coast of Pangaea. The collision with these arcs appears to be quite analogous to the ongoing Collision between modern Indonesia and Papua New Guinea and involved many different subduction zones not one. The exact details are not well understood which is probably why this was left out but with Seismic tomography techniques developed by Karin Siglock and her colleagues we can now reconstruct the ocean trench configuration over time as these ancient slabs continue to sink deeper into the mantle, a process estimated to take around 230 million years based on crude extrapolation of observed modern sinking rates and assuming this rate is continuous. Its probably more complicated than that but the change in these trenches' tell the story. Thanks to this more complex geological record have now conclusively falsified the "shallow slab story" with ironclad evidence that tells us about as definitively as science allows that for the American Rockies there was no flat slab subduction angle. We can see all the subducted slabs in the mantle for the last 200 + million years and no flattened slab exists down there., none whatsoever. *Not only is there no slab is in the right position or place to do that, we some what perplexingly instead find that all the distinctive fast sheer wave propagating material of subducting plates the slabs abruptly terminate just east of the Rockies and north of the Snake river plain in Idaho*. With the help of seismic tomography of the sunken slabs as well as geochemical dating of igneous petrology and sedimentary reconstructions and perhaps most importantly paleomagnetism data from both batholiths and magnetic grains deposited in sedimentary layers which furthermore can be linked to their parent rock formations via mineral grains collision with more mature archipelago rocks likely took place before said rocks were sheered north Laterally with the rocks of British Columbia now being well placed in both latitude and Longitude to approximately the same latitude where the modern Baja peninsula once the northward net movement of the Pacific plate started around ~100 million years ago believed to be related to certain subduction zones along Australia running out of crust to subduct. In this picture the Laramide mountains were formed via the collision with these particularly well developed island arcs that formed a bit of a microcontinent which when it met North America lead to a major mountain building event as these continental rocks came into contact with each other forming a Himalayan style orogeny where any magma produced by rocks melting under the compressive loads are stuck down tens of kilometers below the surface making volcanism typically implausible. Perhaps more interesting to this story is that along the boundary where the slabs terminate we find a zig zagging offset region of buoyant upwelling hot material within the solid upper mantle which we can trace directly underneath the continent from the offshore continuation known as the Juan de Fuca Ridge to the other offshore continuation which goes by the name of the East Pacific Rise. The timing around 50 million years ago saw major crustal block rotations that made way for Siletzia a young still hot and buoyant oceanic plateau with a successive series of metamorphic core complexes that became exposed and various volcanic pulses which moved across the continent in a time series starting from the north in Washington Oregon Idaho and Montana and moving south over time down to Colorado Utah New Mexico Arizona and Nevada with the evidence suggesting much of this crust is the unzipped/unfolded crust which had built up much of these mountains now exposed through Graben horst terrain associated with extensional mountain ranges. The window for Colorado around 35 Ma was fairly late into the story though it would take even longer in New Mexico and Arizona only around 20 million years ago if I remember correctly. this time series is no doubt an important part of the picture which still needs to be resolved though the East Pacific Rise seems to be involved. If we recognize the igneous petrology work that links Yellowstone to the Siletzia terrain and its counterpart Yakutat currently subducting/accreting up in Alaska as a ridge placed hot spot we can retrace a geological story as the timing of North America overtaking the East Pacific Rise turns out to closely match the ages of the various highly siliceous volcanic zones and adjacent metamorphic core complexes of the so called Tertiary ignimbrite flare up episodes even retracing the timing delays with respect to longitude and latitude something which can not be replicated with the "shallow slab subduction" story. Robert Hildebrand's model suggests that the translational component of the Pacific relative to North America ultimately drew translation through the rocky mountains until around 50 million years ago when the craton of North America became notched into a kink within the East Pacific Rise situated near where the Yellowstone hotspot rose up through the ridge ending this northward translation but beginning to build up tension in the crust of North America tension which 17 million years ago finally gave way with floods of lava in Washington and Oregon and the onset of the formation of the Basin and Range province. There is a catch in his model in that no translational suture fault has been conclusively identified but given that the modern Basin and Range's clockwise rotation is differential rather than rigid in its nature this might not be a problem so much but more work is needed. There is also no geophysical basis for how this shallow subduction story would somehow reproduce the observed terrain of the rocky mountains, its a nice neat story but it only works if you ignore all the geophysical data going back to the 1950's and 60's to today that are incompatible with that story and handwave the mechanisms. The Colorado plateau in particular is still rising dramatically as magma has risen up and volcanos have started to form such as the Dotsero maar eruption and an unnamed cinder cone nearby. The rise of the Colorado plateau is particularly abrupt which is what has created the Grand canyon over the last 10 million years. It seems the combination of an abrupt extensional rise and rigid continental crust that is able to hold together under such tectonic forces is needed to get such extensive canyon systems. As for the Rio Grande rift the data is in and yes it is still spreading at a few mm a year with the key detail being the clockwise rotation of all crust to the west with the Pacific plate again supporting the notion that the Rio Grande rift valley is the true plate boundary between North America and the Pacific at least in terms of the direction of underlying mantle forces. We also now know about the Socorro magma body which is the 2nd largest reservoir of molten rock which continues to grow or fill as magma flows into the crust from the depths of the mantle. One day this will find a conduit to the surface feeding the newest volcanoes of the Rio Grande. Though unless things change considerably there probably will not be a simple cut through of NA as everything to the North of the snake river plain seems to be firmly part of the continent thus far. Though the Adirondack hotspot is potentially a very different story as it seems to be connected to a huge upwelling mass of buoyant material which seems suspiciously like a mantle plume heads predicted shape rising up adjacent to an old subducted slab wall that seems to have crashed down into the Core mantle boundary region. A slab wall probably involved in the story of the formation of the Rockies as it looks to be related to the subduction zone off the coast of Pangaea. That might very well cut North America in two though more along an east west divide likely involving one or more of the old reactivated rift scars either the Mesoproterozoic aged rift complex which formed the originally glacially re-excavated rift lakes we call the north American great lakes or the younger less well developed New Madrid fault which is a rift zone from the Cambrian which is noteworthy for recently reactivating after hundreds of millions of years. In the shorter term the Snake river plain is an extensive extensional zone active due to Yellowstone but also likely on the EPR just like Yellowstone hot spot is. The bits of crust getting torn off by the Pacific seem to be headed up towards Alaska so in a way the crust that was North America will probably survive somewhat reuniting in a very different configuration.

Why describe a future North America as "dead?" When the Inland Sea of the Cretaceous divided the continent, it was merely one chapter in an entire life. And the continent reformed bigger than ever. Now if Texas wanted to drift away to continue its Regressivaceous Era for all eternity, I'd throw a goodbye party starting tomorrow.

Wait.. are they being topped up or eroding away. Both were said

I love the very scientific demonstration of how subduction works. Oil on a CD - sure, that works. 🤣

The Appalachian Mountains used to be one of the tallest mountain ranges in the world and has eroded down to almost nothing and eventually will be pushed to the coast will they will erode to sand😢

Soundtrack. Drums? Drama? It's not a crime drama.

Sounds exactly like what is happening in Europe! I was in Europe in 1976 and to see what they glaciers look like now is sad, all eroding away.

Just think..there are people out there walking around thinking the Earth is just 6000 years old.

I wish they would have discussed the San Andres fault just a bit. I know it's not part of the Rockies, but it is part of the Pacific Plate.

Love the documentary, but that background music is a bit much...

several times you show Half Dome in Yosemite. Fix the video

interesting but too much heavy music

This is a very good documentary, however, the constant interference of grandiose music makes it very unpleasant to watch. This is a common problem with many videos on RU-vid.

The music sounds like it is from a Bourne movie lol

Glaciers in the Rockies have been retreating since about 1850, long before human CO2 exceeded baseline levels of 285 ppm. The retreat likely has nothing to do with human CO2 emissions, but promoting the CO2 myth is what gets you juicy research grants.

"Rocks are rocky. But not bullwinkle-y." ---Albert Einstein

Pollen dating seems to be a much more reliable method for dating ancient material rather than carbon dating.

*Let the Sunshine In...*

Great video, but I had to stop halfway through, as it has way too many breaks for commercials.

Uni of New Mexico is maaaadd

Subduction zones elsewhere have volcanos...not sure that subduction is a valid theory here.

All the billions and billions and billions of animals that had to die just so in the 21st century humans would be taken pretty pictures with their cell phones😢

Carbon dating is how age is found. It's not precise but pretty dam close.

Amazing how they formed millions of years ago, 4000 years ago. Just ask Noah.

Montana mentioned🗣️

This show is talking about the rockies while showing clips of Alaska and Yosemite lmao.

Yet Eocene erosional surfaces on the tops of some of the mountains in Colorado?

The Pacific plate wasn’t subducting, nor was the Farallon plate . North America hit a micro continent where there was Westerly subduction beneath the micro continent called the Insular Super Terrain or the ribbon Continent . When North America slammed into the super terrain this caused the stacked thrust faults and the block uplifts that made the Rockies over millions of years . After which the now added micro continent shifted North over millions of years building the Rockies Northward . Overtime other exotic terrains( eg Siletzia ) were added to the West Coast creating the West Coast of America that we know today . In which after this event ,Farallon subduction finally began east beneath North America until North America slammed into the East Pacific Rise, creating the transformed plate boundary known as the San Andreas fault with the Pacific plate heading north west and the North American plate in respect to the Pacific plate which is moving faster is heading south east . With only now the Jaun De Fuca plate left in the north , which is Subducting to the east creating the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest . Now to explain in more depth when you go back in time, North America had subduction happening Westward beneath this insular super terrain . My point being that the volcanic arc of that West subduction was the super terrain itself . From erupted material and uplift from the oceanic vs super terrain collision . This means the the landmass that was the super terrain would’ve been above sealevel .untill the ancient ocean closes completely causing a continent vs super terrain collision creating the very formation of the Rockies. Another reason that we know this to be true is because the material from the subduction of that ancient ocean floor stacked on top of each other which I call a ( folded slab ) well one of these folded slabs can actually be found beneath the mantle this is being made possible with new technology, allowing geologist to look within the mantle and one of these folded slabs dates perfectly with the position of North America at the time of the Rockies formation and the subduction itself as a subducting slab is the result of a trench, and in most cases, a trench will move with a continental, moving plate . Now from the latitude and position of this slab it shows that this folding was happening stationary as there was no movement to the east from this super terrain toward North America. Rather North America was encroaching towards this super terrain which was a volcanic arc from Westwood subduction . And like all landmasses, once all the ocean floor is subducted, it is a convergent collision story between two land masses above sea level, causing mountain building events that are not volcanic in origin.

Pile 2 was the only pile I was attracted to. Wow, I totally relate❤️

great music in this one

I didn’t know mountains had a root

Why is the music so loud.

Some scientists say they are 500 million years old.

I love watching Naked Science; especially given my current attire (nothing)

I bet the rockies were made by aliens

200 million years old? If you believe that then you have more faith than I do

why am i watching embedded ads when i pay for premium? not cool. ended the video

So this means one day the western part of North America will disappear under the eastern part of North America

The anthropogenic source of ha ha global warming.... I love it.

Thanks for sharing Spark!

As a Floridian, can we expedite California’s departure from mainland US. Thanks.

Great information but the dramatic music is so distracting I had to stop watching.

Beautiful pictures of mountains, but too much flashing, sparkling, drumming, sudden blasts of sound. Is this a science program or a rock concert? I'm gone.

This channel is invaluable 😍

This is the 3rd different explanation for the formation of the Rockies that I’ve seen in a week. You got to love the soft sciences. You can literally make up your own story.

Had to stop at the 7:00 mark because the Pacific Plate did Not subduct under the NA Plate!

The means used to date the age of these mountains and rocks are actually a Super Wild Ass Guess. Mt. St. Helens blew up in 1980 and rocks were created in the lava flows which date to being 10,000 years old or so. Just saying.

And the Younger Dryess ?

There was a time when there were no glaciers. Are there glaciers in Britain? Did there used to be? How long ago? Erosion is normal. Eventually the Earth will cool and orogeny will cease. This is normal. Pity they thought they required the silly photo effects and lame demos.

all cats have fur...therefore if an animal has fur..he must be a cat...silly right? This presentation was done in the same mindset...the Geologists here all assume no special Creation, billions of years, and present processes...but among many other things that show the fallacy of that thinking, consider this: in all major mountain chains, uplift is still occuring, so is erosion, but the pace of erosion is much faster than uplift, so how could any mountain form? Consider as well this: why do all the major chains look brittle and broken in jagged profiles? millions of years of erosion would erase any sharp edges, and the sheer walls seen so often could not withstand the force of gravity for hundreds of thousands of years, they would have long since collapsed.

Climbers dream

That woman towards the end look like one of those creatures that lived in Burrows 250 million years ago😂😂😂

Why not a hundred billion trillion years? You weren’t there and these things can change in a single night.

I wish these shows would concentrate more on the soecific, granular evidence rather than making sweeping conclusions that are oater refuted by updated science (and bible scholars)

Ever hear of carbon dating?

horrible background music

Considering the Yellowstone super volcano is over due, so Id say that'll happen 20 more times first..

You guys have some cracked analogies 😂😂... granite backs, mountain garbage police investigating

or a celestial body moving through our solar system causing the mountains to rise

Geologically speaking Everything about the show is fault. We don’t know how the Rockies are actually built because There too young and we don’t know the mechanism is pushing them up because they are still rising. This is conjecture being portrayed as fact.

The backbone of North America? Who writes this idiotic talk? I'm out of here.

1 Timothy 6:20 O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: 1 Corinthians 15 1 Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; 2 By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. 3 For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; 4 And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:

This documentary must be old, there are no lgbtq+ people.

🤥 you mean the 5,000 year history.

No one can prove anything is 200 million years old. Its all ASSUMPTION and theoretical - like Neil Tysons"intelligence"

There is no million years ago, it's only been thousands of years ago only ! … According to the Bible study that I have found & learned it all in, which is the authorized King James Bible version thousands of years only not anything more than that …

can we just give the dems the west side?

Omg, this is lame

The uplift began after the global flood. To deny that there was a global flood is like denying that you have a nose in front of your face.

Continental collision. ➡⛰⬅(6:35) 19:15 The American Rockies: like a pizza spatula. 🍕🦅