How Did the Green Mountains Form?
The Green Mountains are part of the New England portion of the Appalachian Mountains, an ancient landform that runs from the southern United States all the way to Canada along the eastern coast of the North American continent. The Green Mountains are the eastern range of mountains in Vermont, the other being the Taconic Mountains. The southernmost end of the Green Mountains, located in Massachusetts, is known as the Berkshire Mountains. Vermont was named for the mountains, literally "verts monts" in French, which was the language of the area's first explorers.
All mountains are formed by one or more of three processes: convergence, subduction and volcanism. Convergence occurs when the land wrinkles above colliding land masses, and subduction happens when one slides under the other. Volcanism takes place as the Earth's crust pulls apart, making weak places in the mantle where the molten contents of the Earth can bubble up to erupt into the cooler atmosphere and form lava fields and new mountains. All of this movement is called "Continental Drift," caused by the shifting of the Earth's crust over the molten center as the earth spins around the solar system in space. The Green Mountains were formed by this movement as the continent of Euramerica collided with Gondwanaland and Angra to form Pangea, the primeval super-continent that broke apart into the continents as we know them, a slow dance that began over 300 million years ago. As Euramerica collided and twisted to fit into the super-continent, its edges rippled and folded above the line of impact, an area stretching from present-day Quebec to eastern Texas. When Pangea pulled apart, the southern edge of this line wrinkled, forming the Ozark Mountains, the Blue Ridge and Piedmont Mountains, and the northern ranges fractured into the ranges of New England.
The forces that made the Green Mountains occurred during the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods, a time that is determined by geologic evidence of convergence, considerable shifting, uplift and fragmentation, followed by extensive glacial activity. The presence of all three types of rock--igneous as well as metamorphic and sedimentary--confirms that the mountains were formed by events including volcanism, which occurs when the sea floor is subjected to stretching. The mountains have been worn down to gentle, rolling peaks, the tallest of which is only a bit over 4,000 feet. They are covered by well-developed soil and boreal (evergreen) forests with alpine growth on higher peaks, and lush vegetation that gives them their name. All of these factors indicate biome evolution that takes hundreds of millions of years and is not typical of younger mountain ranges such as the Rockies and Himalayas.
Tags: Green Mountains, Earth crust, Euramerica collided, Green Mountains Form, Mountains Form, occurs when, this movement
