The Line Time Erased; Where Will It Be Drawn In The Future? 

Many have asked about the Chicxulub impact and it's affect on the gulf. Unlike it's affect on life, the effects it left behind in the rock record are only visible in the immediate vicinity. The history described in this video is a great example of our earth recycling rocks. The folded and deformed layers of rock in the Rocky Mountains are being eroded and transported out into the gulf where they are redeposited as nearly horizontal layers of sediment/rock. At some point in the future, the layers of rock in the gulf will be uplifted/folded and eroded with the sediments carried by rivers to the ocean and redeposited.

Dear Mr. Cook, I just want to thank you for your wonderful videos. I was recently talking to my brother about how RU-vid has made information available to us that we could only dream of in the past. You are a wonderful example of how I can go back to geology class but in a fun and friendly and understandable way. It's like ongoing learning about subjects I barely touched in school has become so much richer because of people like you. I'm just so grateful for the effort you make to share your passion and knowledge with us! 😀

At first, I saw this video was 46minuets and I doubted I wanted to watch it all. I ended up pausing in several places to think about what I was learning, and even rewinding at times to hear it again.

I can't believe you aren't sponsored by a whiteboard manufacturer.

Oh my goodness, Mr Cook you just made mine and many others night. Still cant get over how well put together and easy to understand your videos are. You make learning fun and we all thank you for that.

I am a retired Structural Engineer and used to work with Geologists and Geotechnical Engineers several years ago. I was always fascinated with their ability to look at the features of at and below the earths surface and explain how the various formations came about. I wanted to take but was unable to schedule a geology course back at University. Taking that Geology course would have been very memorable if someone like Myron was teaching the subject matter. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience.

You are amazing at communicating not only the idea, but your enthusiasm for it. It’s infectious and it’s a teaching that holds so much stronger than any list of dates and names. Thank you for sharing your life with us!

I love your Socratic teaching style. Your videos are so absorbing. When you say things like "Now what could have caused this?" I automatically try to come up with the answers. Your teaching is working because I'm right more and more of the time! Thanks so much for giving us these wonderful videos.

Prime time Friday night. What a pleasant surprise 😊

Thanks for another amazing presentation! Your videos previously inspired me to learn more about the formation and evolution of basins. My brain feels rewired now, thinking about the hundreds of millions of years of geologic history I can travel through in a few short hours of horizontal travel, and thinking about how the surface-level rocks in one spot may be hundreds of meters below my feet in the next spot. There is something almost terrifying about it: Like a snapshot of a stormy, churning ocean. That photograph may not appear to move, but you get a sense of the unfathomable and unstoppable forces that are continuing to play out.

It's easy, and a little dry, to say the Rockies are filling in the Gulf of Mexico. You managed to make the connection between Wyoming and the Gulf so real I can feel it happening.

Ok, I’m dialing up the request line. Please add a follow-up video along this topic, but covering the formation of the Western Interior Seaway, along with general timelines. Timelines so we better understand why we find Jurassic fossils in Colorado, but not later Cretaceous.

It's good to see you again Myron! Thank you. ❤

Gosh darn Myron, here I think you are the most wholesome man on earth, the sultan of strata, the king of conglomerates, and then you go and pair up with an absolute doll to present the most wholesome product in the entire world. I love you man.

This right here is why I subbed a long while back. This stuff fascinates me, and you do a great job of explaining it. Appreciate it :)

You do such a fantastic job of instilling wonder and explaining the processes in simple terms without treating your audience like idiots. Thank you for these fascinating stories of our planet and the systems which shape it.

Spent a career looking at relief maps of North America, finally some explanations to what I was seeing. Best site on the internet. Keep up the excellent work.

Educational and entertaining as always! Your videos are always so thought provoking to a layperson like me! My first thought was to the amount of fresh water being dumped in the Atlantic Ocean from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and what that must be doing to the ocean floor. There has to be some changes because of sentiment that was trapped inside the ice. Also, having spent years in Micronesia, I love talks about reefs! There is nothing like sitting in the middle of an ocean and ponder the geological forces that created the islands and reefs. (See the Rock Islands of Palau) And reefs can’t grow deeper than around 50 meters (150 feet) for anyone wondering. Finally, there’s a lyric from the band Radiohead that says “gravity always wins”. Geological forces are driven by gravity and how numinous is it that we have a somewhat rudimentary (?) understanding of these forces and their outcomes?!? I love these! Thanks!

Ya, the fact I watch the whole videos without any fast-forewarding is testament to how interesting you make this subject.

Myron, Every one of your videos seems to be even better than the last. As you said it's hard to wrap your head around these processes, but yet there they are. Safe travels, looking forward to the next one.

Beautifully done video, Myron. Thank you so much!

so excited to be early to one of your videos, i love traveling through geologic time with you!

Wonderful video! Ten years ago I moved from Chicago to 12 miles SE of Paris Texas. While building on my property I became fascinated by the geology of my new home due to the soil and the layers I encountered as I was building. Turns out, I am right on the "beach" of that ancient sea shore, and a mere 5 miles away was dry land. Places on my property I can dig 10 feet deep and it's all black clay, and 20 feet away I hit the "blossom sands" formation a foot down. This has greatly increased my interest in geology, and you are my go-to source to learn more. Keep up the great work!

This channel is an example of the POSITIVE potential of Social Media! 👍🙏

Reef-building has recently (geologically speaking) started up again on the western side of the Gulf. About 10-15,000 years ago, several salt domes pushed up high enough out of the sediment for coral reefs to start building on the edge of the continental shelf due south of the Texas/Louisiana border. They’re the Flower Garden Banks

Great video and easy to understand even for non-geologists. I appreciate the additional information in kilometers. Thanks Myron!

All right Mr. Cook, if I ever cross paths with you, somewhere, anywhere, you’re getting a high-five! Fabulous video, as always.

Hell yes! Friday night, a good cigar paired with scotch whisky & a world class Myron Cook presentation.

Mr. Cook, I want to thank you for putting in the effort to talk about such a fascinating topic

I think my brain exploded 3/4 of the way through that masterclass Myron. Thanks, one I will watch a few more times to fully appreciate it.

Another amazing video, drawing so skillfully on your earlier work. Artfully weaves many facts and observations together, describing the processes shaping this area! Stunning!

Epic! This is just boggling. I live just east of the Balcones Fault. If I understand correctly, the fault may have been caused by subsidence of the coastal plane as it was loading up with sediment. This discussion really puts all of that into perspective, wow!

Yet another mind-blowing excursion through time. You tell a good story and keep us in suspense the whole way as all the puzzle pieces fall into place. You have an amazing talent for translating complex scientific information into a layperson's language and making the enormity of geologic processes and timescales tangible - using nothing more than a whiteboard! Amazing!

Thank you very much for always telling us the metric equivalent of measurements, it makes it a lot easier to grasp the scales involved when they're put in familiar numbers, and not having to do the conversions myself is so convenient! Thank you as well for sharing your friend's fossil kits! I have a few friends over in the states with young relatives who love nature and science, so it's great to be able to recommend them gift ideas.

Banger after banger after certified banger! My first video of yours was about the salt features within the Gulf of Mexico. This was a great follow-up video which fans out very wide. As a side note, I know the 3rd point for why the sediment lowered by over 13k feet was similar to what the glaciers did to Hudson Bay, which is why that land is still rebounding upwards after the glaciers melted. However, that got me thinking about your Yellowstone-Hudson connection video. If i understand correctly, the Bighorn and Yellowstone Rivers should have emptied into the Hudson Bay until just 70k years ago. But rivers are ever-changing over millions of years. Paleolithic rivers within the last 66 million years could have been vastly different.

This program was very enjoyable and educational. It took a lot of work and hours and hours of your time and miles of driving to pull all of this supportive visual information, text, audio, editing, production etc into a comprehensive and easy to understand explanation of a very slow, complex and massive geological event. Thank you for each and every minute and dollar you spent on this amazing production!

Thank you, Myron. You have a knack for building mental pictures that convey your appreciations. Yes, the processes are beautiful.

I appreciate your videos. Well done sir!

This production is truly amazing. Shawn Wilsey and Nick Zentner got nuthin on you! Truly. Your cinematic abilities are just wonderful and your informational content is even better. Thank you thank you thank you.😍

Dazzling demonstration, very educational and understandable! What a pleasure to follow you in your explorations and descriptions.

Love your work!!!

Wow! This video was so interesting. I think this is one of my favorites!!! Thank you, Mr Cook. ❤❤❤

First video. New subscriber! I don't usually watch videos with commentary or make comments but it only took a few minutes and you took me to this place along with you and I felt involved in solving the mystery. I've been all over the area in the video, and it's fun to understand what you're talking about. I have traveled around the US for many years to look at interesting places but still love to see what others find out there. Great job and I'm gonna watch some more videos!

What a great video! I loved the way you connected so many processes so very clearly. Thank you!

Thats fantastic! Now we, in Montana along the bighorns, will request that Texas gives us back our dirt. Lmao! 😂😂😂😅😅😅😅😅😂 Great class, Mr Cook. Thank you!

Mr Cook. I would like to share a boyhood story. In the 1950's my Dad bought a small farm about 10 miles east of Elgin, Texas (along US High 290 -- to Houston). At the time I noted as a boy that we had a heckava time getting regular wooden / cedar posts to stay in the ground when building fences and cattle pens for our dairy cows. The sand in that are is about 2 feet - 5 feet deep. And it is like beach sand -- fine / white very soft composition. It was/is so soft it was very hard to set fence post so we changed to "low-voltage electric fencing for our pastures. This band of sand runs for many miles thru that area and is great for peanuts, cantanlopes, watermelons, etc. The sand holds water very well. In my college years, I made friends with a guy who was a geology major (Univ of Texas -- I was too poor to go away to college -- I served in the US Army and got my degree like many ex-GI's in 1968 thru the VA program. Anyway, this geology student was also a Veteran (back from Vietnam) and I mentioned this sand to him -- what could it be. He was intrigued and so we headed out to Elgin on a Saturday morning to check out my Dad's farm. Sure enough. His theory was that the sand in that region (Bastrop County Texas) was the site of an ancient beach where the ocean came to end as you note in your drawing --- I can tell you that area does not have soil like the area between Elgin and Austin only 25 miles west on Hwy 290. The soild there is black clay and much more dense. Thanks for your great show. H Dunbar, Austin

I've been subscribed for a while now. I really enjoy your style of teaching. This video is one of my favorites!

The wait is over, happy 2024 to all ❤🙏 thank you for the video sir

Thank you. Enjoyable and educational.

I have enjoyed your presentation. The thoroughness of your description of the geologic processes is exceptional. Thank you.

Another good geoVideo from Myron.. Whiteboards in classrooms were starting to be common near the finish of my Elementary school teaching career 2010 and they are indeed wonderful.. Large touch screen boards for teaching may be next..

You have a well crafted narative, as i generate questions they are answered within a few statements.

Oh yeah! firing this up for me and the boys!

Phenomenal presentation Mr. Cook!

I love your videos. Thanks so much for putting in so much care and effort into making them.

The erosional top of the Devil's Tower...account for the uplift and the movement of the surrounding miles.

Growing up in the upper Missouri Ozarks (Gasconade County), and from my hiking & caving and geology minor at UMR/MSM/MS&T, I was always fascinated and astounded by the thoughts that our Ozarkian and Ouachita / Boston Mountains along with out neighbors to the east (Appalachians) were "as tall if not taller than the Rockies, like maybe Himalayans!"... and so when walking these Ozark hollers, I'd shake my head in disbelief as there was "no way" -that- much erosion, -that- much of these hills / mountains could have been eroded and then carried away... all the way to the Gulf of Mexico?!?!? But yet, thanks to Myron and others before, this is indeed the history of our lands. Couple the land masses moving from tropical zones, more water from the Ice Ages, and even the addition of the Missouri River to the Mississippi River [yes, lol, I am watching your other videos Myron! :) ], so much more erosional forces have removed these high points to their current stages - over these vast distances of time. Geology is forking amazingly cool! BTW, I am though a bit stumped yet about the connection of our Ouachita Mtns to the Appalachian with that other remnant in SW Texas... how did the Mississippi River -and- the Gulf's history relate to that range? I don't really see that in Ron B's maps shared in the video here? Much thanks sir!

Fascinating! You did a heck of a job on this one. Thank you (and your professor who made the maps).

Gosh a mighty, wow! I feel like I just audited a master’s level survey class and loved every minute of it. You are a remarkable teacher. Thank you.

thank you for this video

Thank you , the Sherlock Holmes of geology love it ..🖤

Excellent video, Mr. Cook! What a fantastic story. My mind's eye saw the Gulf opening up and the layers of salt, limestone and then mud being laid down. Amazing! Thank you very much. Please keep telling the stories.

Fascinating. Very well presented. Thank you.

Thanks for the fascinating thoughts on geology and scale. What effect would the temporal hiatus of large reef building animals after the Great dying have had on things? I know by the mid Jurassic the Rudist clams had adapted to fill that niche which they held up until they were wiped out 66 Ma in the KPg extinction but there would still have been an at least brief lull before modern reef building corals locked in the niche as the main reef building animals with endosymbiotic algae. On the topic of your little add and fossils Sea stars interestingly enough appear to be descended from crinoids that evolved to flip upside down so yeah the star shape is no coincidence in those fossils. Echinoderms are frankly weird animals which based on what I've read seem to have from an evolutionary perspective to have lost their body trunk as stalked heads. Now onto the sedimentation of deep time yeah and if memory serves its even more crazy further back in time as pretty much everything between the Appalachians and the Rockies is fill from one point in time or another like kilometers of sand/sediment fill which makes the Earthquakes from the recently reactivated new Madrid fault system extremely dangerous but also fascinating as quakes can produce enormous sand blows. Given the growing evidence for a fascinating more complex history of the Sevier & Laramide mountains as a Jurassic to Paleocene story of subduction archipelagos which NA collided with I wonder what contribution of sediment they might have provided from the interior side of the continental divide of the time. Of course what that looked like is tricky business what with the Cretaceous northward translation of the Pacific and all these arc collisions of which we only know the trench configurations with much of the crust of those ages now in British Columbia and Alaska not to mention much of the western US having been considerably stretched out by the mind boggling levels of extension between the Eocene and now but at least some percentage of that material from the easternmost parts of those mountains would have been carried east into the Gulf of Mexico rather than to the west. After all there is some evidence for arcs off the coast in some old sediments with sediments coming from both directions so the easternmost of these western mountains should have fed east. That would have to be the main source of sediment during the Mesozoic when there was that interior sea way right? As for the future of the Gulf of Mexico I'm not sure it will be so easy to determine as Geology is complicated. For example the rate of sedimentation depends on the trends of mountain building and in the case of reef building we have as a species kind of screwed the poor coral reefs towards extinction due to fossil fuel abuse leading to ocean acidification and rising temperatures. In the what if component of possible tectonic future evolutionary trajectories if the Rio Grande rift system continues to develop or the reactivated New Madrid starts to extend again that could all effect the eventual future for North America and thus the Gulf of Mexico. You also have those Caribbean subduction zones which could get involved depending on how plate motion evolves. They aren't that far west now but I can't help but wonder if the subduction zone could expand in the future especially if as some think the forming Subduction zone of the Azores Gibraltar fracture zone starts cutting into the Atlantic. After all NA is in the conventional picture being driven by a combination of slab pull and ridge push of which slab pull is the dominant driver because gravity so whenever NA run's out of Farallon remnants to subduct its plate motion will probably change potentially shutting off the extension as NA is pushed and pulled against the mantle discontinuity associated with the East Pacific Rise and Yellowstone. Something I found interesting reading up about ocean ridges and the degree of which their rate of spreading changes over time is that the Atlantic while still vigorous is slowing down while the Pacific actually is speeding up in terms of the rate of seafloor spreading. If true those factors combined might lead to the Pacific resurging as an ocean basin gradually tearing away the continental crust that had crossed its mantle ridge discontinuity boundary carrying them away to Alaska. That would then mean that there would no longer be a substantial drainage basin for sediments to come from which would lead to a reduced level of sedimentation. In that case the Gulf could potentially survive for some time as a basin. Or maybe given that from Seismic tomography there was once a significant subduction zone focus situated around the longitudes of the Eastern US and Caribbean subduction might spread into the Gulf with the gulf partly filling up as a result of westward dipping subduction? Too many variables!

32:42 If you look at coral carefully, you will see little bands of annual rings. Under a microscope you can make out daily rings within each annual ring. Today's corals have 365 microrings inside each annual ring. But the coral from 160 million years ago would have maybe 380 microrings because back then Earth was spinning faster and each year (each trip around the sun) had 380 spins for 380 days. As the moon orbits Earth and makes tides bulge here and there, this creates friction that slows down Earth's spin. The disappearing velocity is transmitted to the moon by the laws of physics and gravity (since the tides jerk the moon from in front of the moon, so slowly pull the moon into going faster and faster little by little over millions of years). So as the moon is accelerated by the pull of the tides it generates, its orbital distance from Earth increases and the moon gets slowly thrown further and further from Earth. Therefore, today some of the total eclipses of the sun aren't full eclipses because the moon is far enough away that a ring of sunlight (annular ring) is left around the circumference of the moon when the eclipses is as full as it can get. Used to be there was no such thing. Today only some of the solar eclipses are true full eclipses, like the one in August 2017. Millions of years into the future the moon will be accelerated far enough away that all eclipses of the sun will leave the sun's edge peeking beyond the moon's edge all the way around and true full solar eclipses will happen no more. Over time the moon will continue wandering further and further away and the moon will become smaller and smaller to our perception in the sky. In about 4-5 billion years more the sun will run out of fuel worse than now, the mass of the sun will balloon out due to the reduced gravity, and the enlarged dull red lower temperature sun will engulf Earth. But in the process of swelling the sun will be big enough and closer enough that high temperatures will kill off all higher life forms in about 1 billion more years. If we don't develop some type of interstellar rockets for cosmic lifeboats, we will be extinct.

Thank you Myron, fantastic video as always

So fantastic! I love your enthusiasm, Mr. Cook! ❤❤

Mind blown Myron...

Hi Mr. Cook! I love your channel and look for your new video each month. I got a PhD in geology way back and I love seeing the beautiful places you and your brother film. Your bentonite flat irons video really took me back. I sampled the bentonite pits back in the '80's and we found shark tail fin drag marks in the sand under the clay. It was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. On the assignment you gave at the end of your last video, I measured 26000 pixels squared for the Gulf fill and 5000 pixels squared of unfilled basin space from your cross section at the end of the video. I take this to mean about 1/6 of the basin remains to be filled. According to Wikipedia, " The age of the salts are supported by the stratigraphy in the northern Gulf of Mexico where the Eagle Mills red beds, as discussed above, contain dikes as young as 180 Ma." That means 5/6 of the basin filled in 180 million years, Dividing 180 by 5 = 36 million years per 1/6 of the basin to fill, which is also the time left to fill up the Gulf of Mexico. Cool! That's pretty soon in Earth terms!

Myron, thank you so much for sharing your passion with us!

Thank You Myron. I Love learning about geology. Thanks to You for your teaching style and illustrations, understanding is enjoyable. So, Thank You Myron. So happy I found You. Much Appreciated! Sandra

So Pangea Earth was not round but oblong, which implies a change in rotational speed over time as Earth got more round. Sloshy Oceans slow down and sediment settles? To say nothing of convection forces underground. Was Earths water always a fixed quantity, ice, vapor or fluid? Why do we have water? My mind wanders and wonders. . . Great Episode.

And here I thought that the Gulf of Mexico was created by an asteroid...

I think our favorite thing about your videos is we never know where you are going next!! Thank you for helping us learn so much about our beautiful planet & it's history! ❤

One of the very best channels on this subject if not the best there is. his way of explaining is a joy to listen to it makes it so much more easy to understand

Is it true that Devils Tower/Bear Lodge Butte was a live tree????

812 views in 35 minutes!

Greetings from south Texas! These are outstanding. Thank you for all of the thought and effort that goes into produces this series. Best JB

What a great Sunday morning geology lecture. You've got yourself a new subscriber!

Hi, do you think the famous "Sahara Eye" is where the legendary Atlantis once located? thank you.

65 million or so

Mr. Cook. I love your information pack yet so clear videos. Thanks so much. I wish there were videos like this on the part of the Rift Valley that runs up the east end of the Mediterranean.

What a teacher! Love your channel! Blessings and thanks for the knowledge.

at first glance i thought it was the Sharpie line that Trump drew when he couldn't handle being wrong about meteorology 😅

Simply mesmerizing Myron, well done!

This is the second of your programs I've seen, new sub and many thanks for your efforts.

BETTER THAN ANY GEOLOGY CLASS I HAVE EVER TAKEN !!!!

Another nice explanation I enjoyed learning from. Thanks.

Thank you so much, Myron for making geology so interesting and easy to understand.

When I was in Colorado I was told the Rocky Mountains of today is the third rendition of that mountain range; the two previous Rocky Mountains each eroded away, evidently, to the Gulf of Mexico. Myron Cook is an excellent explainer; I could absorb all he was saying with his graphs and way of presentation. I have learned so much.

Fascinating. Thanks for another great presentation sir.

Dear Myron; I ran across this video again and knew so because I'd already hit the like button! This is one of my favorite geologically topics! Looking at it from Google Earth , I find these areas mesmerizing! As usual I absorbed more information than the first time 😊 You're like the Mr, Rogers of geology for me! At 67, I'm so pleased to be able to study a topic unrelated to a future career choice, making it an absolute pleasure to also study under your fine tutorage. I'm an easily excited rock hound. I snagged a 35 lb. "rock' from NE. France in 1999, which I must return, but you'll understand when I tell you that it spoke to me at the time, saying, "Bring me home with you!". I'm quite the animist, so if course I listened! It's very unusual from the rocks around it. Its sienna colored, with shiny, sparkles throughout. I'm certain it wasn't local to the area, as far as I could tell, which adds to it's mystery! It had been worked into a particular shape, and knocked out of its intended location. I just love it, and look at it every day with happiness! Today, while lumbering around outside, I found a flattened, oval shaped stone; 3 long×2 1/4" inches across, which I snatched up right away! It looked as though it had been in a river at some point in its life; not smooth but in a uniformly flattened pillow shape. It is a light brownish grey with white spots and tiny black flecks. It has tiny pitting throughout and my guess is that it's some sort of natural conglomerate. It also didn't match other stones I saw in the area. I'd love to know more about it! It's location and appearance alone made it stand out. Thank you for your wonderful presentation! As always 😊 R7 .

Geology and history were my two favorites courses that I loved back in grade school. These two courses, in my opinion taught me the locations of untold riches, like treasure maps. They also instilled in me the concepts of thinking extremely in-depth and wide. Your presentation just showed me that I definitely didn’t see wide and long enough. Your knowledge inspired me once again to the two topics. Thank you very much.

The "Big Muddy" into the "Mighty Mississippi" headed to a new home. That was very interesting to watch. Thanks, as always.

WOW... It just boggles the mind!!! Amazing explanation. Thank you Myron for these videos.

Great explanation once again. And also beautiful scenery and drone shots, it makes me want to visit Wyoming!

This is, quite possibly, the best thing I have ever seen on the internet. Thank you for sharing your knowledge! I love this!

Well done and thank you for converting the dimensions into the metric system so that we mere mortals can more easily follow and portray this interesting story.

What an amazing teacher you are! I'm very grateful to have found your video!

I appreciate so much that you put in meters the distances you mention. Awesome video.