How the Rocky Mountains Formed (And Why They Shouldn’t Exist)

Drive west across Kansas and the land runs flat for hundreds of kilometres, then just past Denver a wall of rock rises more than 2.7 km above the city. By the usual rules, it shouldn't be there: the Colorado Rockies stand more than 1,000 km from the nearest plate boundary. So how did they get there? This episode digs through 1.7 billion years of rock to find out: the ancient basement under Colorado, the Ancestral Rockies that came and went, the strange flat slab of ocean floor that slid under the continent, and the ice that carved the peaks we see today. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 1:06 Chapter 1: Foundations 2:39 Chapter 2: The Flat Slab 5:34 Chapter 3: After the Squeeze 6:51 Chapter 4: Carved by Ice 7:48 Conclusion: What we learned SOURCES & FURTHER READING Liu, L., Gurnis, M., Seton, M., Saleeby, J., Müller, R.D. & Jackson, J.M. (2010). The role of oceanic plateau subduction in the Laramide orogeny. Nature Geoscience 3, 353–357. Livaccari, R.F., Burke, K. & Şengör, A.M.C. (1981). Was the Laramide orogeny related to subduction of an oceanic plateau? Nature 289, 276–278. Dickinson, W.R. & Snyder, W.S. (1978). Plate tectonics of the Laramide orogeny. Geological Society of America Memoir 151. Humphreys, E. et al. (2003). How Laramide-age hydration of North American lithosphere by the Farallon slab controlled subsequent activity in the western United States. International Geology Review 45, 575–595. Colorado Geological Survey: Geologic Map of Colorado. Elevation profile: SRTM, Mapzen and ASTER terrain data via OpenTopoData. Heights in the opening are exaggerated, and deep cross-sections are not to scale. HOW THIS VIDEO WAS MADE Researched, written and directed by me. Every frame is motion graphics, animated in code with Claude (Anthropic): no stock footage, no AI video. Narration voiced with ElevenLabs. Music composed in code for this film. If you want more geology like this, subscribe, and tell me in the comments which mountain range we should take apart next. #geology #RockyMountains #platetectonics #Colorado #earthscience