Sunrise on Rocky mountains with blue sky on Rundle Forebay reservoir in autumn at Canmore, Canada - Photo from Town of Canmore/iStock
The GeoConvention, a three day Earth science conference at Calgary’s TELUS Convention Centre took place over this past weekend, and one presentation had geologists at odds with one another.
The presentation titled “Were the Canadian Rockies made in Nevada?” was the source of some controversy, but raises some interesting points about the history of the land, from as far back as the Cretaceous period. The working theory? The mountains were originally located along the latitude of what is now Nevada, but moved north due to “a major strike-slip fault known as the Tintina fault”.
A major strike slip fault is essentially a crack in the earth, where two blocks of rock slide sideways past one another, instead of one block moving up or down. Like two people brushing past one another in a hallway.
The Tintina Fault is nothing new to geologists, first observed over a century ago, the fault stretches from Alaska to the Yukon to Northern BC, and is frequently compared to California’s San Andreas Fault.
According to research from Arizona geologist Robert Hildebrand, the fault appears to stop once you get to the Rockies, and according to Hildebrand, runs directly underneath the Rockies.
The findings are supported by paleomagnetic data, which has been described as the half-way point between geology and physics.
Because of how long ago this may have occurred (50 million or more years ago), the large fault traces or scars in the earth, which would be direct evidence of the movement, is not highly visible in this day and age, compared to how easy the San Andreas Fault is to study.
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