Teachers' Domain; Earth and Space Science; Plate Tectonics: Lake Mead, Nevada

This. Might. Make me Nevada below this barren unforgiving landscape an earth shattering event is underway. North America is splitting apart. Physicist Marcia McNutt is struggling to understand what may be the creation of a new continent. When we try to understand the break up of say Africa and South America we don't have anyone can come in and tell us exactly when and how far and. That's all so old and so buried and it happened so long ago. We'll never piece it together. The beauty about going to a place like this is it's all so fresh and preserved the differentiation that occurred here is in the geologic time scale a blink of an eye a way. And that's why this is such a wonderful spot to study this process. Like me is the only large body of water lying over the fault line where the continent is splitting apart. To the west of Lake Mead

over the past 20 million years. The movement of the plate has been stretching the continent. The clearest way to see this is to look at the normally horizontal deposits of sediment. Now tilted on these mountains. Pieces of the earth's crust toppled over like a row of dominoes forming a series of mountains and valleys all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The Dominoes a pothole almost all the way. That's the first one of these big rotated domino blocks. Before we get to the flat line strata and that flaps those Westray just go for hundreds of miles in that direction in the form of rocks. Go over a hundred miles in that direction. So it's really a big transition right here and it's really sharp. This is a place where a continent is falling apart before our very eyes.