“As for age of the earth, I want to know what the Appalachians looked like when they were young....”
The young Appalachian Mountains were barren rocks and sand the height of the present day Rocky Mountains and Alps Mountains, and they soon became buried under immense fields of snow, ice, glaciers, and continental ice sheets during the worst ice age to occur in the last 600 million years. Trees, grasses, and almost all other forms of terrestrial plant life did not yet exist. Terrestrial forms of animal life did not yet exist. Terrestrial life forms in the form of fungi and liverwort-type plants were just barely beginning to colonize dry land along the streams and valleys of the lowlands adjacent to the seas when the ice age occurred. So, the young Appalachian mountains were desolate young mountains which soon became covered in snow and ice much like the mountains of Greenland and the Antarctic today, but without the terrestrial life forms.
thanks! Love rugged mountain pics. and dogsleds.