Kind: captions
Language: en
you're so used to seeing your town your
city or even your continent that it's
easy to forget everything on the planet
used to look completely different but
this tour will take you Coast to Coast
showing you some highlights of how North
America took its shape today take a look
at New York City today it's a grid of
streets lined with enormous buildings
but there are strange rocks all over the
city hinting at an earlier far different
landscape about 450 million years ago a
chain of volcanic islands headed towards
the coast bulldozing mud from the
seafloor and pushing up mountains 10
times taller than any skyscraper in the
city as the mountains eroded away mud
from the sea compressed into Manhattan
shist this Bedrock makes strong
foundations for the Towering skyscrapers
that make up this amazing Skyline
today now let's go to the Rocky
Mountains as permanent a fixture as they
seem now these spectacular Peaks haven't
always been here before the Rockies came
the ancestral rocky mountain range that
dominated the landscape here erosion
ground these mountains down into sand
and Pebbles which were buried and
crushed into sandstone slabs millions of
years later violent forces pushed up the
Rockies version 2.0 lifting and tilting
these Sandstone slabs sideways this
created the flat irons that can be seen
in the foothills of today's Rockies
nearby in Zion National Park Sandstone
forms the sheer walls of the cliffs
that's because this place used to be all
sand The ancestral Rockies disrupted the
atmosphere preventing moisture from
reaching this land transforming it into
a vast desert with Dunes piled upon
Dunes but some of the most surprising
clues of the continent's Past come from
fossils here in Kansas you can find
bones of an 80 milliony old fish that
was 14 ft from end to end so what was a
fish doing here in the dry Plains of
Kansas 130 million years ago after the
ancestral Rockies had eroded away oceans
flooded the land creating a vast warm
sea that split North America in two not
far away at the kyoz plateau in Utah the
bones of scores of dinosaurs from this
hot house world have been discovered
along what was once the coast of the
Inland sea
the ground reveals not just how life
flourished but also how species died you
may have heard that an asteroid the size
of Mount Everest hit the Yucatan
Peninsula laying waste to the dinosaurs
here in the bad lands you can actually
see the thin dark layer that contains
the Telltale evidence of the impact 65
million years ago below the line you can
find dinosaur bones above it none from
then on mammals ruled the continent over
time those mammals Diversified and in
the laa tarpits bones of giant Ice Age
mammals have been found woolly mammoths
saber-tooth tigers and camels right here
in what is now the booming Metropolis of
Los Angeles those Ice Age beasts began
to disappear from the continent just as
another mammal arrived humans began
their Conquest simply with sharp Spears
but have since changed the entire face
of the continent creating stru es that
rival those built by nature but our
constructions are just as vulnerable as
the ones created by Nature just up the
coast at Wallace Creek the 700m long San
Andreas fault the boundary between the
Pacific and North American plates is
exposed tectonic activity is slowly
moving this part of the California coast
northwards one day the drive between LA
and San Francisco may be a lot less than
6 hours this is just one of many places
on Earth reminding us that the landscape
you see around you today looked
different in the past and will likely
look very different again in the future
[Music]