Book Review: ‘How the Mountains Grew’
What makes John Dvorak’s “How the Mountains Grew: A New Geological History of North America” so special? Dvorak “connects the dots,” so to speak, between places of geologic wonder many geoscientists already know. The book provides context to well-known outcrops and fundamental geologic processes. There is still a lot to learn for those who have studied geology for many years!
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What makes John Dvorak’s “How the Mountains Grew: A New Geological History of North America” so special? Dvorak “connects the dots,” so to speak, between places of geologic wonder many geoscientists already know. The book provides context to well-known outcrops and fundamental geologic processes. There is still a lot to learn for those who have studied geology for many years!
When the theory of plate tectonics was proposed, our concept of how the Earth worked went through a momentous shift. But tectonics alone cannot – and do not – explain everything about the wonders of the North American landscape. It all points to the geologic secrets hidden inside the more than 2-billion-year-old continental masses. A whopping ten times older than the rocky floors of the ocean, continents hold the clues to the long history of our planet.
Plate tectonics handily explains mountains, uplifts, down warps, faulting, earthquakes and volcanoes along plate edges. But intra-cratonic processes were not well understood within the plates, until recently. Earthscope, a National Science Foundation program that ran from 2003 to 2018, produced time-lapse tomography revealing deep mantle processes. The imaging beneath North America shows how “delamination” causes broad intraplate uplifts like the Colorado Plateau. Mantle avalanches affect the overlying crust with crypto volcanic plumes, hotspots like Yosemite and earthquakes like the New Madrid Fault Zone.
A real page-turner, this book begins with early earth and ocean, craton formation, and our special relationship to our nearest celestial neighbor, our moon. The journey continues as mantle crust interactions drive plates to converge and separate in “Wilson Cycles,” extinctions and evolution. Readers will gain privileged insights into our planet. Professional geologists will enjoy the book because it provides deeper insights about many outcrops that they already know.