My Earthy Valentine
The other afternoon, I hiked for miles on an ocean floor. The sky was beautiful. Every now and then, a bird would fly by. Did my feet get wet? Not very. I managed to navigate around the patches of snow on the trail that took me to Sandia Mountain’s highest peak, which is 10,678 feet. There I took a deep breath and relished the fresh air.
That mountain I walked on in New Mexico is 10,000 feet above sea level. When I stood on its crest and looked at the terrain below, I felt like I was on top of the world when in fact I was caught in a time warp. The crest is 1.3 billion years old, which is why there are no fish anymore.
What one finds instead is limestone with fossils, evidence of marine life that existed on our continent a long time ago. I’m not sure if “our continent” is quite the right phrase, though, since the continent we live on looks nothing like the one that was here millions of years ago when so much of our world was not yet born.
About 250 million years ago, the water evaporated and trees began to grow. Reptiles appeared, dinosaurs studied today by schoolchildren in New Mexico, just as schoolchildren in Saltville, our neighbor in Smyth County, learn about the earth’s changing patterns with Saltville’s fossils from the late Pleistocene Epoch, which began to fade about 11,000 years ago.
Our very own wooly mammoth went extinct when its habitat began to change. To survive, this creature needed more snow than we’ve had this winter. It depended on a tundra diet. It depended on ice, just as the Cretaceous hadrosaur depended on water.
The Virginia Standards of Learning for Science invite children to think about dinosaurs and miscellaneous extinct creatures as early as elementary school. Children learn all kinds of things in order to understand “the concept that science can provide explanations about nature, can predict potential consequences of actions, but cannot be used to answer all questions.”
I like how the Standards remind schools to address how “rocks and fossils from many different geologic periods and epochs are found in Virginia.” If I had gone to school during the days of standards-based testing, perhaps I would have learned as much about geology as I did this past week. I’m ashamed to say that I never knew that so much of our continent had been under an ocean. I knew a good bit had been, but I had never managed to learn just how much.
After I rode the world’s longest aerial tram ride back down the mountain, I saw a bluebird fly by, a mountain bluebird. It wasn’t anything like a fish, but it did have something in common with dinosaurs. Some people think that birds are first cousins to avian dinosaurs, and they speculate about what helped these creatures manage to survive and evolve over time while other dinosaurs like the hardrosaur were becoming extinct.
Returning home, I watched more mountains move closer to me as my plane moved towards Tri-Cities. Centuries of wind and rain have worn our mountains down to half the size of the Sandia Mountains, which emerged about 25 million years ago. Born about 680 million years ago, our mountains are very old.
Marine fossils have been found here too. Next time I go hiking, I’m going to think about how I’m as close to the ocean as I was when I grew up on the coast of North Carolina—just a few million years short of getting my feet wet.
Felicia Mitchell. First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 15 February 2006, p. A4. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2005.
That mountain I walked on in New Mexico is 10,000 feet above sea level. When I stood on its crest and looked at the terrain below, I felt like I was on top of the world when in fact I was caught in a time warp. The crest is 1.3 billion years old, which is why there are no fish anymore.
What one finds instead is limestone with fossils, evidence of marine life that existed on our continent a long time ago. I’m not sure if “our continent” is quite the right phrase, though, since the continent we live on looks nothing like the one that was here millions of years ago when so much of our world was not yet born.
About 250 million years ago, the water evaporated and trees began to grow. Reptiles appeared, dinosaurs studied today by schoolchildren in New Mexico, just as schoolchildren in Saltville, our neighbor in Smyth County, learn about the earth’s changing patterns with Saltville’s fossils from the late Pleistocene Epoch, which began to fade about 11,000 years ago.
Our very own wooly mammoth went extinct when its habitat began to change. To survive, this creature needed more snow than we’ve had this winter. It depended on a tundra diet. It depended on ice, just as the Cretaceous hadrosaur depended on water.
The Virginia Standards of Learning for Science invite children to think about dinosaurs and miscellaneous extinct creatures as early as elementary school. Children learn all kinds of things in order to understand “the concept that science can provide explanations about nature, can predict potential consequences of actions, but cannot be used to answer all questions.”
I like how the Standards remind schools to address how “rocks and fossils from many different geologic periods and epochs are found in Virginia.” If I had gone to school during the days of standards-based testing, perhaps I would have learned as much about geology as I did this past week. I’m ashamed to say that I never knew that so much of our continent had been under an ocean. I knew a good bit had been, but I had never managed to learn just how much.
After I rode the world’s longest aerial tram ride back down the mountain, I saw a bluebird fly by, a mountain bluebird. It wasn’t anything like a fish, but it did have something in common with dinosaurs. Some people think that birds are first cousins to avian dinosaurs, and they speculate about what helped these creatures manage to survive and evolve over time while other dinosaurs like the hardrosaur were becoming extinct.
Returning home, I watched more mountains move closer to me as my plane moved towards Tri-Cities. Centuries of wind and rain have worn our mountains down to half the size of the Sandia Mountains, which emerged about 25 million years ago. Born about 680 million years ago, our mountains are very old.
Marine fossils have been found here too. Next time I go hiking, I’m going to think about how I’m as close to the ocean as I was when I grew up on the coast of North Carolina—just a few million years short of getting my feet wet.
Felicia Mitchell. First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 15 February 2006, p. A4. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2005.
posted by Felicia Mitchell | 8:49 AM
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