Is "front range" a typical phrase to describe that?
I'm originally from Illinois, but I want to write about landscapes other than cornfields. I need remedial lessons in mountain terminology. 🙆
It’s the area I live in! I’m not sure if it’s used elsewhere, but it’s a large area from Wyoming through much of Colorado. 🙂
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_R...
I cried when I went to Scotland. Here were the mountains so close to the Adirondacks that I love, only devoid of trees. A desolate beauty. I wanted to walk around spreading seeds.
The Adirondacks are a part of Appalachia in New York. The word is Iroquois for "tree eaters" which is what they called Europeans who came and cut all the trees down and took them away. Fortunately, we let the trees come back.
I've seen this one! It sent me down a rabbit hole, staying up one night reading charts of how much taller the tallest Himalaya is than the tallest Alp is than the tallest Rocky etc. Changed how I see the whole world.
Not that THAT'S even the end of the story! Comparing the heights of the tallest peaks per range is just one way of looking at it.
It's kind of like redwoods (tallest) versus sequoias (biggest by overall volume, I believe).
Have y'all ever visited buttes and mesas in the American Southwest and then come back to forested hills and mountains and started to think of them as just having clothes on?
I've spent the past week in Utah and Arizona and it's *wild.* Never seen a landscape like it. Our scenery (UK) is all ice-carved. Everything's rounded over and ground down.
I live amongst the nudist (and well suntanned) US Southwest buttes and hills, and that's how I think of those hills and mountains in the green parts of the world. They're covered in clothes, shy about flaunting their geology.
I think this is the best comparison. It doesn't feel surprising that the landscape would be older than life on Earth, but that it should be older than a planetary feature? I guess the intuition it's hitting up against is that bigger things last longer.
Maybe it's so impressive to me because almost the entirety of Washington State is younger then the death of the dinosaurs. Only a single dinosaur fossil has ever been found here and there's only a handful of places you can even see rocks that old and none of them are unchanged
I think about things like this when I visit my local Maine beach. The sand that swirls around my toes used to be part of a young Appalachian mountain-range that soared as high as the Himalayas do now. The depth of time is just unfathomable.
Reinforces how I was taught about the Sierra Nevadas. They are really just a jagged shard sticking into the sky from plates colliding. Like shrapnel from a car collision.
Exaggerating the vertical scale helps make comparisons easier. Surprising fact: If the earth and a billiard ball were the same size, the billiard ball would have taller mountains! That globe you had as a kid where you could feel the mountains was a lie.
It’s worth noting that the coast-to-coast measure of the US is a bit under 3000 miles, while the highest elevation in the continental US is a bit under 3 miles above sea level, so in a 1000-pixel map, that would translate to a 1 pixel height for Mt Whitney!
The difference in elevation between Mt Everest and the Marianas Trench is approximately 20,000m (12.43 miles) which seems like a lot, but the diameter of the Earth is 12714–12756km depending on whether you measure at the equator or the poles.
So that difference in elevation is less than the diameter difference of the earth due to its rotation! A billiard ball has a diameter of 2in and the variation in the earth’s diameter scaled to that level would be 0.0066in which is smaller than a dust mite.
I should also point out that the diagrams that show the earth’s elliptical orbit are also a lie. Drawn correctly proportioned, the earth’s orbit is indistinguishable from a circle to the naked eye. (And don’t get me started on the pictures that overstate the size of sun & planets vs orbits).
