The North American Cordillera Today: Pleistocene, Holocene and the Anthropocene: Ca. 2.6 Ma to Present

Abstract

At the dawn of the Pleistocene, the western Cordillera was largely shaped in its present form. All terranes that had amalgamated to North American from Alaska to Mexico, through a span of over 350 million years, formed a significant fraction of the landscape. Although these terranes were highly deformed and often covered by younger rocks or thick vegetation, geologists working in the field noticed their anomalous origin and so these exotic terranes were ultimately identified. To think of a time before these terranes were known and understood is to think of Cordilleran geology in its infancy.

The original version of this chapter was revised. An erratum to this chapter can be found at DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59636-5_14