Rocky Mountain Research Paper

The Rocky Mountains, also known as the Rockies are a masive mountain range located in western North America. It is believed that to the south the American Rockies exsisted under sea level at some point millions of years ago. Looking similarly too florida and it's tropical tempertures. Proof of this is in the Colorado Rockies, sediment left behind, mostly large fossils of female ammonites or squid, crabs and other sea creature fossils. Just outside Denver, Colorado lay large 60 degree a ngeled slabs of rock known as the Flatirons. Over millions of years sediment become compressed into these layers of rock. Clues to what may have caused the tilted sedimentary layers are the darker rock at the bottem called granite, which has no layering like the rock on top of it. The garnite full of menerals showing signs of magma, from a liquid rock. From class I know that magma is usually found deep within the Earth. But this rock has been pushed up causing a tilting effect. Geologist believe that the force strong enough to raise these mountains are plate tectonics. The movement of these broken up plates smashing into one another when the Rockies were formed on the American west coast. As the American plates began to subduct at a high rate of speed it began to traanfer stress into the interior of the continent. Over millions of years it began to …show more content…
Very dynamic in that they seem to be always chaning and growing as if a live. Scientist resort to fossels once again as evidence for the height of past mountains. Cracking open rocks reveal a million-year-old fossilized leaf. A clue found in the egdes of these leaves known as leaf margins. Scientist compare the number of leaves with teeth to thoes without. Giving them an ideas of what the temperture might have been at that time. The smoother the leaves with smooth edges the cooler the temperature of the site. Linking that the cooler the temperature the higher the