Monday, December 8, 2014

New Mexico's Geologic Future


New Mexico's geography is marked by some stark, striking symmetries. Bisected almost perfectly down the middle by the Rocky Mountains, and a little less perfectly by the Rio Grande River, New Mexico is a land cut up by veins and webs of geographic and cultural importance. Not surprisingly, the Rocky Mountains are not one big mountain range, but two distinct and nearly perfectly parallel smaller ones, the Jemez mountains in the west, and the San Juan in the east. No matter whether in The Great Plains in state's easternmost third, the jagged volcanic landforms of the northern Great Plains, or the High Plains that run along the New Mexico-Texas border, everywhere you go will be completely, totally arid and dry.

In 10,000 years...
The physical geographic formations that mark New Mexico will not have changed much. 10,000 years will likely not be enough time for volcanism in the Rio Grande Rift to reactivate, as the last period of recorded volcanic activity will have ended just under a million years earlier. As global temperatures are expected to continue rapidly rising, droughts will worsen and appear with increasingly greater frequency. If the Rio Grande is more than 50% evaporated now, and the Pecos River about 15% evaporated now, by this point these rivers will like have dried up completely, stopping any and all hydrological erosional processes.

In 1,000,000 years...
Volcanism along the Rio Grande Rift will have been reactivated. As the movement along this normal fault heats up, the valley that is now home to the Rio Grande River (but will then likely be a completely dried-up valley) will continue to sink. The mountain ranges on both sides of this valley, the Jemez and San Juan, will continue their uplift.

In 100,000,000 years...
By this point in geologic time, tectonic plate movement will have progressed to the point of literally tearing what is now the United States in half through the South and Midwest.

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