Canada's Appalachian Uplands Aren't What You Think

Drive into Trout River in Gros Morne and the boreal forest stops dead. Past that line the ground is orange and bare, and it is not crust at all — it is the Earth's mantle, lying on the surface with a walking trail across it. The bedrock under southern Nova Scotia has no counterpart in North America either, and the closest match is Morocco. What's beneath YOUR town? Personalized 15-page report — the rock, the name, the vanished places, your town's oldest map → https://hiddenprovinces.com The Appalachian belt in Canada is not one worn-down mountain range. It is the eroded roots of at least four separate collisions across two hundred million years, and the hills you can see today are younger than the Atlantic Ocean. This video works through the whole belt: the Chic-Chocs and the McGerrigle granite in one park, Mount Carleton as a Devonian volcano, Percé Rock and its real age, the Himalaya claim corrected against Hillenbrand and Williams, Miguasha as the mountains' obituary, the four terranes of Cape Breton, the Dover Fault and the Gondwanan crust of the Avalon Peninsula, the sideways Alleghanian and the Maritimes Basin, Prince Edward Island as basin fill, the standing forests at Joggins, why the Atlantic did not reopen along the old join, what the Scotland and Norway correlation actually rests on, the Tablelands of Gros Morne where the mantle is on the surface, and Mont Albert, where the last caribou south of the St. Lawrence are standing on the same rock. Gaspé, Chic-Chocs, Mont Jacques-Cartier, Percé, Miguasha, Mount Carleton, Cape Breton, the Cabot Trail, Meat Cove, Joggins, Chignecto Bay, Cape Split, Cape Spear, Mistaken Point, Gros Morne, Trout River, Thetford Mines, Val-des-Sources, Mont Orford. Figures come from the Geological Survey of Canada, Parks Canada, Sépaq, the New Brunswick and Newfoundland geological surveys, the Percé UNESCO Global Geopark, UNESCO World Heritage documentation, MELCCFP, and published work by Williams, van Staal, Hillenbrand and Williams, Waldron and colleagues, Krogh and Keppie, Hendriks and colleagues, and Wang and van Staal. Where the literature disagrees, the narration names the disagreement and does not pick a side. Where an official source overstates something, including Parks Canada, the correction is made on air. Subscribe to The Hidden Provinces — beneath the map.