Bonus Post; Ouachita Mountain Geology on the Drive to Hot Springs, AR

In this image, you can really see the syncline/anticline topography

This is a bonus post just showing some pictures I took of the Ouachita Mountains of west-central Arkansas as we drove to Hot Springs.

The ridges lining up one-by-one

You can see how the ridges line up parallel to each other. Each runs for 20-50 miles, with deep linear valleys in between. The rumpling of the core rocks of this mountain range caused these formations due to compression when Africa was colliding with North America some 400+ million years ago. This was long before the age of the dinosaurs and back when the entire Earth was one super-continent called Pangaea.

Above you can see the wide Ouachita River Valley that separates two areas of the mountain range. These mountains became separated from the Appalachians about 300 million years ago when South America began to drift north, causing a rift in the Appalachian range.