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Interior Plain
The Interior Plains is a vast physiographic region that spreads across the Laurentian craton of central North America, extending along the east flank of the Rocky Mountains from the Gulf Coast region to the Arctic Beaufort Sea. In Canada, it encompasses the Canadian Prairies separating the Canadian Rockies from the Canadian Shield, as well as the Boreal Plains and Taiga Plains east of the Mackenzie and Richardson Mountains; while in the United States, it includes the Great Plains of the West/Midwest and the tallgrass prairie region to the south of the Great Lakes extending east to the Appalachian Plateau region. Geologic history A series of tectonic plate collisions in the crust that formed the center of the North American continent laid the groundwork for the modern-day interior plains. Mountain building and erosion around the plains as well as flooding from inland seas provided sediments that make up the rock strata of the interior plains. Proterozoic Eon (2500 to 539 mi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Plains
The Great Plains is a broad expanse of plain, flatland in North America. The region stretches east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, and grassland. They are the western part of the Interior Plains, which include the mixed grass prairie, the tallgrass prairie between the Great Lakes and Appalachian Plateau, and the Taiga Plains Ecozone, Taiga Plains and Boreal Plains Ecozone, Boreal Plains ecozones in Northern Canada. "Great Plains", or Western Plains, is also the ecoregion of the Great Plains or the western portion of the Great Plains, some of which in the farthest west is known as the High Plains. The Great Plains lie across both the Central United States and Western Canada, encompassing: *Most or all of the U.S. states of Kansas, Nebraska, and North Dakota, North and South Dakota; *Eastern parts of the U.S. states of Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming; *Parts of the U.S. states of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas; *Sometimes western parts of Iowa, Minnesot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phanerozoic Eon
The Phanerozoic is the current and the latest of the four geologic eons in the Earth's geologic time scale, covering the time period from 538.8 million years ago to the present. It is the eon during which abundant animal and plant life has proliferated, diversified and colonized various niches on the Earth's surface, beginning with the Cambrian period when animals first developed hard shells that can be clearly preserved in the fossil record. The time before the Phanerozoic, collectively called the ''Precambrian'', is now divided into the Hadean, Archaean and Proterozoic eons. The time span of the Phanerozoic starts with the sudden appearance of fossilised evidence of a number of animal phyla; the evolution of those phyla into diverse forms; the evolution of plants; the evolution of fish, arthropods and molluscs; the terrestrial colonization and evolution of insects, chelicerates, myriapods and tetrapods; and the development of modern flora dominated by vascular plan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sedimentary Basin
Sedimentary basins are region-scale depressions of the Earth's crust where subsidence has occurred and a thick sequence of sediments have accumulated to form a large three-dimensional body of sedimentary rock They form when long-term subsidence creates a regional depression that provides Accommodation (geology), accommodation space for accumulation of sediments. Over millions or tens or hundreds of millions of years the deposition of sediment, primarily gravity-driven transportation of water-borne eroded material, acts to fill the depression. As the sediments are buried, they are subject to increasing pressure and begin the processes of compaction (geology), compaction and lithification that transform them into sedimentary rock. Sedimentary basins are created by deformation of Earth's lithosphere in diverse geological settings, usually as a result of plate tectonics, plate tectonic activity. Mechanisms of crustal deformation that lead to subsidence and sedimentary basin formatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mountain Building
Mountain formation occurs due to a variety of geological processes associated with large-scale movements of the Earth's crust (List of tectonic plates, tectonic plates). Fold (geology), Folding, Fault (geology), faulting, Volcano, volcanic activity, igneous intrusion and metamorphism can all be parts of the Orogeny, orogenic process of mountain building. The formation of mountains is not necessarily related to the structural geology, geological structures found on it. From the late 18th century until its replacement by plate tectonics in the 1960s, geosyncline, geosyncline theory was used to explain much mountain-building. The understanding of specific landscape features in terms of the underlying tectonics, tectonic processes is called ''geomorphology, tectonic geomorphology'', and the study of geologically young or ongoing processes is called ''neotectonics''. Types of mountains There are five main types of mountains: volcanic, fold, plateau, fault-block, and dome. A more de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Himalayas
The Himalayas, or Himalaya ( ), is a mountain range in Asia, separating the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau. The range has some of the Earth's highest peaks, including the highest, Mount Everest. More than list of highest mountains on Earth, 100 peaks exceeding elevations of above sea level lie in the Himalayas. The Himalayas abut on or cross territories of Himalayan states, six countries: Nepal, China, Pakistan, Bhutan, India and Afghanistan. The sovereignty of the range in the Kashmir region is disputed among India, Pakistan, and China. The Himalayan range is bordered on the northwest by the Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges, on the north by the Tibetan Plateau, and on the south by the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Some of the world's major rivers, the Indus River, Indus, the Ganges river, Ganges, and the Yarlung Tsangpo River, Tsangpo–Brahmaputra River, Brahmaputra, rise in the vicinity of the Himalayas, and their combined drainage basin is home to some 6 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indian Plate
The Indian plate (or India plate) is or was a minor tectonic plate straddling the equator in the Eastern Hemisphere. Originally a part of the ancient continent of Gondwana, the Indian plate broke away from the other fragments of Gondwana and began moving north, carrying Insular India with it. It was once fused with the adjacent Australian plate to form a single Indo-Australian plate, but recent studies suggest that India and Australia may have been separate plates for at least 3 million years. The Indian plate includes most of modern South Asia (the Indian subcontinent) and a portion of the basin under the Indian Ocean, including parts of South China, western Indonesia, and extending up to but not including Ladakh, Kohistan, and Balochistan in Pakistan. Plate movements Until roughly , the Indian plate formed part of the supercontinent, Gondwana, together with modern Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and South America. Gondwana fragmented as these continents drifted apa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trans-Hudson Orogeny
The Trans-Hudson orogeny or Trans-Hudsonian orogeny was the major mountain building event (orogeny) that formed the Precambrian Canadian Shield and the North American Craton (also called Laurentia), forging the initial North American continent. It gave rise to the Trans-Hudson orogen (THO), or Trans-Hudson Orogen Transect (THOT), (also referred to as the Trans-Hudsonian Suture Zone (THSZ) or Trans-Hudson suture) which is the largest Paleoproterozoic orogenic belt in the world. It consists of a network of belts that were formed by Proterozoic crustal accretion and the collision of pre-existing Archean continents. The event occurred 2.0–1.8 billion years ago. The Trans-Hudson orogen sutured together the Hearne- Rae, Superior, and Wyoming cratons to form the cratonic core of North America in a network of Paleoproterozoic orogenic belts. These orogenic belts include the margins of at least nine independent microcontinents that were themselves sections of at least three ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Canadian Encyclopedia
''The Canadian Encyclopedia'' (TCE; ) is the national encyclopedia of Canada, published online by the Toronto-based historical organization Historica Canada, with financial support by the federal Department of Canadian Heritage and Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada. Compiled by more than 5,000 scholars and specialists, the publication is a non-partisan, non-political initiative by a not-for-profit organization without political or governmental ties. First published in 1985, the consistently updated version has been available for free online in both English and French since 2001. The physical copy and website includes "articles on Canadian biographies and places, history, the Arts, as well as First Nations, science and Canadian innovation." , over 700,000 volumes of the print version of ''TCE'' have been sold and over 6 million people visit ''TCE'''s website yearly. The encyclopedia website consists of more than 25,000 entries and over 60,000 multime ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Appalachian Plateau
The Appalachian Plateau is a series of rugged dissected plateaus located on the western side of the Appalachian Mountains. The Appalachian Mountains are a range that run from Nova Scotia in Canada to Alabama in the United States. The Appalachian Plateau is the northwestern part of the Appalachian Highlands physiographic division of the United States, stretching from New York (state), New York state to Alabama. The plateau is a second level United States physiographic region, covering parts of the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia. Geography and physical features The formation of the plateau began during the Paleozoic, Paleozoic Era. Regional uplift during this time caused the area to rise altogether without changing the topography of the land. The eastern side of the plateau appears as a mountain range. This false appearance is due to a very steep slope on the eastern side ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Lakes
The Great Lakes, also called the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes spanning the Canada–United States border. The five lakes are Lake Superior, Superior, Lake Michigan, Michigan, Lake Huron, Huron, Lake Erie, Erie, and Lake Ontario, Ontario (though hydrologically, Lake Michigan–Huron, Michigan and Huron are a single body of water, joined at the Straits of Mackinac). The Great Lakes Waterway enables modern travel and shipping by water among the lakes. The lakes connect to the Atlantic Ocean via the Saint Lawrence River, and to the Mississippi River basin through the Illinois Waterway. The Great Lakes are the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth by total area and the second-largest by total volume. They contain 21% of the world's surface fresh water by volume. The total surface is , and the total volume (measured at the low water datum) is , slightly less than the volume of Lake Baikal (, 22–23% of the world's surface f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
