Hacker News

If you want to section hike it, its entire North American part is covered by the Eastern Continental Trail (ECT), which some people (very few, as in a tiny fraction of all A.T. thruhikers) thruhike it in a single calendar year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Continental_Trail

surely you mean overbearing English, old man?

Appalachian Fae, mysterious lights, all the stories. Love it.

A lot also settled in the farmlands of Western Kentucky and brought sheep farming along with them, which is how it emerged as a very intense (mutton, pork, chicken, beef) bbq region.

On the island of Ireland those people _are_ the overbearing Brits.

Nick Zentner, a geology lecturer at Central Washington University, takes a particular subject and does a relatively deep, discussion oriented, dive into it over the course of 26 sub-topics... his "A to Z" series. In these he does a couple streamed shows a week and includes links to relevant papers and resources. At the end of each session is a viewer Q&A for those watching live. Almost an online continuing education course....

He did "Baja-BC A to Z" 3 years ago:

https://www.nickzentner.com/#/baja-bc-a-to-z/

With the associated reading list: https://www.geology.cwu.edu/facstaff/nick/gBAJA/

Currently he's about halfway through another "A to Z" called "Alaska A to Z" which covers some of that same territory

https://www.nickzentner.com/#/livestream-series-26-episodes/

And the so-far-posted reading list: https://www.geology.cwu.edu/facstaff/nick/gALASKA/

Of central importance to the first half of the current Alaska series is recent paper by geologist Robert S. Hildebrand titled: "The enigmatic Tintina–Rocky Mountain Trench fault:a hidden solution to the BajaBC controversy?"

What's great about these series is that he'll get a number of the geologists writing these papers involved in one way or another. Either contributing interviews or talks specifically for the video series, or like in the case of this Hildebrand centric work in the current series, Hildebrand himself is watching the stream and participating in the live chat with the other viewers, answer questions and the like.

In Scotland, surely they're concerned with the future supply of whisky casks, not whiskey casks.

Also, AIUI, because bourbon has to be aged in new white oak barrels, you find a lot of former bourbon barrels aging distilled spirits all throughout the world, Scotland included.

> including the famously flat Lincolnshire fens.

I think they might have gotten flatter in the intervening 200M+ years.

The southern end of the Atlas, the Anti-Atlas range, is from the same formation as the Appalachans. The rest of the Atlas came from a different (later?) event.

I've been nerd sniped. Per Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Mountains

> In the Paleogene and Neogene Periods (~66 million to ~1.8 million years ago), the mountain chains that today constitute the Atlas were uplifted, as the land masses of Europe and Africa collided at the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula.

But it also notes,

> The Anti-Atlas Mountains are believed to have originally been formed as part of the Alleghenian orogeny. These mountains were formed when Africa and America collided

Anti-Atlas? If we jump over to the Anti-Atlas article we see,

> In some contexts, the Anti-Atlas is considered separate from the Atlas Mountains system, as the prefix "anti" (i.e. opposite) implies.

and

> The summits of the Anti-Atlas reach average heights of 2,500–2,700 m (8,200–8,900 ft),

So in addition to subsequent events, the portion of the Atlas originally formed with the Appalachian is geologically distinguishable from the other portions of the Atlas chain, and actually significantly lower than the parts of the chain formed later, though not as low as the Appalachians.

The Himalayas formed because the Indian craton moved exceptionally fast northward (all the way from Antarctica) and collided with Eurasia, one of the fastest sustained plate motions known in geological history.

The collision with Asia began around 50–55 Ma and is still ongoing, which is why the Himalayas are still rising today.

The Himalayan mountains are new kids on the block. The Appalachian ranges pre-date life on land, they pre-date the evolution of vertebrates.

They don’t.

They're also mountain ranges formed from the collision of plates? Otherwise, nothing, the timelines of the formation of the Himalayas and the Appalachians are hundreds of millions of years apart.