153 pointsby lifeisstillgood2 days ago16 comments
  • shagie2 days ago
    And if you want to hike it, you've got the International Appalachian Trail... https://iat-sia.org/the-trail/
    • almog2 days ago
      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

      • AndrewKemendo39 minutes ago
        I segment hike the eastern AT probably monthly and encounter a half dozen thru hikers a year.

        It’s a very busy trail with relatively good infrastructure .

  • biomcgary2 days ago
    This explains the Scotch-Irish settling in Appalachia. It felt like home, but without the overbearing Brits nearby.
    • librasteve2 days ago
      surely you mean overbearing English, old man?
      • oncallthrow2 days ago
        No, we just found Nicola sturgeon’s hacker news account
      • clickety_clack2 days ago
        Ya, the Scotch-Irish were the Brits doing the overbearing in Ireland.
        • physicsguya day ago
          Let’s also not forget that the Irish lords that the Anglo-Irish supplanted were themselves the descendants of Normans.
          • a day ago
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          • orwina day ago
            No, they weren't, not in a meaningful way.
    • SubiculumCode2 days ago
      Appalachian Fae, mysterious lights, all the stories. Love it.
    • esseph2 days ago
      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.
      • IAmBrooma day ago
        Wait, where is BBQ mutton a thing?? I need a specific location for Waze, stat!
        • ErroneousBosha day ago
          Pretty much the whole of the Middle East, and consequently most of Glasgow following the various diasporas.

          There used to be a place on Allison Street that did a kind of mutton liver and spinach stew with fenugreek and green chillis that I am currently right at this moment prepared to drive a 12-hour round trip to buy.

    • sollewitt2 days ago
      On the island of Ireland those people _are_ the overbearing Brits.
      • nephihahaa day ago
        The English were in there centuries before them.

        Scotland and Ireland were exchanging population for millennia because they are physically close. As soon as England got involved, trouble began.

  • fsckboy2 days ago
    glancing at that map, an interesting (to an American mostly just cuz we think we know our own geography) trivia factoid came to mind:

    Q: Where in the US are you closest to Africa?

    I'll explain the answer key at the bottom so you don't see them sooo readily if you want to think about it... but whatevs

    an entirely different interesting factoid, the Catskill Mountains in NY State, which seem to be part of the Appalachian Range, are in fact not mountains at all. What appear to be mountains is actually erosion of a high plateau, leaving mountainous appearing hills https://static1.thetravelimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl... (they are however connected to the Appalachians, they just aren't mountains)

    .

    Wrong Answer: adirolf

    A: eniam

    I wrote the words backward

    • nonameiguessa day ago
      I'm pretty sure it's the US Virgin Islands, but I guess you don't want to include territories.
    • ErroneousBosha day ago
      By quite a comfortable margin, too.

      I guess it's kind of like how Edinburgh on the east coast of the UK is quite a bit further west than Bristol on the west coast of the UK.

      • fsckboy19 hours ago
        i didn't know that, i need to find an aerial view

        and similar, traversing the Panama Canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific puts you farther east.

  • aklemma day ago
    When I learned this, I also learned that in the Appalachian Mountains, the valleys were the peaks originally and the peaks are what were the valleys. This has to do with the type of rock and the erosion that has happened; the original peaks were a softer rock. That mountain range was extremely tall at one point.
  • sakopov2 days ago
    According to this study from 2005 [1] the Appalachians are eroding 6 meters per 1 million years while the rivers are incising 30-100 meters per same time period. So they're technically still becoming more rugged.

    [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250326213947/https://www.geoti...

  • al_borland2 days ago
    I visited Scotland last year. They bring this up a lot on tours. Some of the distilleries also bought land in the Appalachian region to grow trees to make future whiskey casks.
    • mauvehaus2 days ago
      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.

      • al_borland2 days ago
        > whisky casks, not whiskey casks.

        Interesting, I just looked up the details on this[0]. I’m surprised they didn’t hammer that home as well. I thought maybe you were just being pedantic at first, but that’s a good call out. I did make sure to say cask instead of barrel, as a barrel is just one size option for a cask.

        They did talk about the rules of scotch vs bourbon and how some of that supply chain works for reuse.

        [0] https://www.scotchwhiskyexperience.co.uk/about/about-whisky/...

      • eszeda day ago
        <Maximum pedantry mode engaged> Either could be correct, because whisky casks begin as whiskey casks. It's wise to be aware of all the links in your supply chain!
      • wil421a day ago
        A lot of times they use whisky casks. Lots of distilleries use bourbon casks because you can only use a cask once for bourbon.
        • IAmBrooma day ago
          Which is restating what the GP said...
  • jjulius2 days ago
    If ya think that's neat, go check out the idea behind Baja BC - that huge chunks of British Columbia and Alaska, as well as portions of Washington, were once down by Baja Mexico.

    https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015AGUFM.T13A2979G/abstra...

    • sbuttgereit2 days ago
      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.

      • jjuliusa day ago
        Hell yeah!!! Huuuuge Nick Zentner fan here, he's the entire reason I even knew about it. I'm a PNW resident and love attending his lectures in April. If you can make it, please do!

        Zentner's a goddamned national treasure.

  • nephihaha2 days ago
    Didn't know about the Atlas, but I knew northern Scotland and Nova Scotia shared a lot of geology.
    • Tagbert2 days ago
      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.
    • aitchnyua day ago
      Nova Scotia and Scotch-Irish settling in Appalachia (another comment). Interesting thought process how a people managed to find their ideal land in spite of continental drift.
      • nephihaha7 hours ago
        There has been an obvious tendency for Europeans to migrate to areas similar to where they came from. A lot of Finns migrated to Minnesota I believe because it is full of trees and lakes and has cold winters much like Finland!
  • trgn2 days ago
    atlas remain very high though. so what's different there that they're not eroded?
    • wahern2 days ago
      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.

  • Ericson2314a day ago
    I'm a little suspicious that they drew the Atlas mountains in the wrong spot.
  • tengwar22 days ago
    I'm finding it difficult to believe that map relates to the title. It's not showing just the Scottish Highlands (roughly speaking the north-west half of Scotland), but the whole of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, plus about half of England, including the famously flat Lincolnshire fens.
    • zimpenfish2 days ago
      > including the famously flat Lincolnshire fens.

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

    • IAmBrooma day ago
      So, you expected a map that omits all adjoining land to the mountains?

      Most people wouldn't object to an article about Kilimanjaro containing a map of where it is in Tanzania, but for reference, here is a map of just the mountain: O.

      • tengwar2a day ago
        If the map labelled the whole of Tanzania, Kenya, and Malawi as being Kilimanjaro, yes, I would have a problem with that.
  • 2 days ago
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  • prennerta day ago
    I would file this under blogspam, given the length of the article, the atrocious oversimplifying, highly compressed map and the number of ads.

    If you are interested in the geology of Scotland, there are excellent books available, including "Land of Mountain and Flood: The Geology and Landforms of Scotland". I am sure good books about the Appalachians and the Atlas are available, too.

  • adolph2 days ago
    The Scottish Highlands are also significant to contemporary understanding of geology.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton%27s_Unconformity

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfdwRRpiYGQ&t=68s

  • brcmthrowaway2 days ago
    Where do the himalayas fit in all this?
    • voxleone2 days ago
      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.

    • mr_toad2 days ago
      The Himalayan mountains are new kids on the block. The Appalachian ranges pre-date life on land, they pre-date the evolution of vertebrates.
    • nkrisc2 days ago
      They don’t.
    • turtlesdown112 days ago
      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.
    • IAmBrooma day ago
      Appalachians:Himalayas::Childhood scar:Pimple.
  • cranberryturkey2 days ago
    check out local hiking trails on ParkLookup
    • IAmBrooma day ago
      "A Progressive Web App (PWA) for discovering and exploring U.S. National Parks."

      So, advertising your side project? Because it is useless for checking out Scottish Highlands trails.