The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History

Résumé :

Four hundred and eighty million years ago, there was no Atlantic Ocean. Africa, Europe, and North America were all connected. North America straddled the equator, and what is now the Atlantic coast lay under water. As the Earth’s tectonic plates collided in this period of intense geological activity, the African plate slamming into the North American plate, the ocean floor buckled, and great sheets of bedrock began slowly rising up in the air. Humans would one day call these the Appalachian Mountains. Over the millions of years that followed, slices of rock crumpled and were thrust miles into the sky as the Appalachians reached exalted heights, nearly as tall as the present-day Himalayas. Eventually the continents began to separate. Vast plains and mountain chains were torn asunder, and water poured into the breach : thus, some 220 million years ago, the Atlantic Ocean was formed. The new ocean separated not just the new continents, but the already ancient Appalachian Mountains themselves. They were, one might say, the first Atlantic crossing. Most of the Appalachians drifted west with the American plate, while the remainder stretched across the ever-growing Atlantic, from Norway to the Scottish highlands, across Ireland and Newfoundland, extending to the Atlas Mountains in northern Africa. Although we think of them as a North American phenomenon, the Appalachians are, in truth, a trans-hemispheric chain-older than the Atlantic itself.

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