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North America The shock wave raised the Appalacian Mountains in the push off from Africa. Central America unfolded from between North and South America. Greenland and the Northern Canadian Islands broke away from North America as it moved west. A trench formed when the Antilles was pulled off of South America. Friction along the entire leading edge built major mountain chains and stopped all movement.
The Appalachians
exemplify impulse mountains raised at the beginning of the Shock
Dynamics event. Folding of these mountains was caused by pressure
from the shock wave initiated by the giant meteorite impact east
of Africa. This is borne out by a specialist in Appalachian geology who
wrote, "maximum
orogeny [mountain building] took place in a linear core belt...
These rocks, and any floor on which they may have rested, were as
if gripped and squeezed between the jaws of a giant vise, and at
the same time heated up enough to become quite plastic and to stew
in their own juice, in the fluids released as they transformed into
mineral assemblages." "...for me the vise is not
a metaphor but a fairly exact model. Thus the evidence of
intense shortening perpendicular to the length of the chain, not
only in the folded marginal belts but also in the central core belt,
is too clear for me to doubt that there was not only confining but
directed pressure, the greatest compressive stress being consistently
directed roughly horizontally across the orogenic belt." "Compression
then relaxed, and the thickened crust rose isostatically to form
mountains and has continued to do so ever since."
As a believer in Plate Tectonics, he could not find a mechanism
in the crust that could do this, but imagined mantle convection
must be involved.
Apparently
there were already two large meteorite impact craters in the protocontinent
before the Shock Dynamics event. Though Hudson Bay opened
up as North America moved, their forms and central peaks can still
be seen.
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