Appalachian Primer

First, let me apologize for never being very interested in geology. If I had been, I would probably already have known some of the facts I learned today from this thread by a geologist named Alex Petrovnia about the Appalachian Mountains.

There's a lot in Alex's thread, but the things I most didn't know:

• The part of New York that I'm from is on the Appalachian Plateau.
• The Appalachians are part of the same mountain range that extends through Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Scandinavia.
• The Appalachians are older than when there was life on land.
• The mountains may have once been as high as the Himalayas, but they've eroded away. Today's Appalachian mountain tops were once the valley floors, because they were made of more durable rock than the peaks.

I knew the mountains were really old, compared to the Rockies, and resulted from tectonic plate movements, but either never knew or forgot the rest of this.