Author Description

"The central Mississippi River Valley, in the heart of the United States, both obscures and reveals a fascinating geological and archeological history. Deep below the young Mississippi River sediments lie 1.5-billion-year-old rocks that assembled like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Overlying these ancient rocks are layers of sedimentary rocks that record hundreds of millions of years of migrating seas and vertical movements that ultimately produced the modern Mississippi River Valley. Within the last 2 million years, ice ages strongly modified the valley landscape and set the stage for entry of Native Americans into the central Mississippi Valley. The archeological record spans some 14,000 years of human occupation in the central Mississippi Valley, from Ice Age foragers to farming communities encountered by Spanish and French explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While all of this was occurring, deep ancient breaks in the Earth's crust were occasionally shifting beneath the central Mississippi Valley, with the most recent large shifts causing very large magnitude 7.5 earthquakes during the winter of 1811-1812. How did these earthquakes affect the landscape? Could earlier earthquakes have affected Native Americans? And what earthquake threats remain in the heart of the United States? This book takes the reader on a walk through deep time into the more recent history of the Mississippi River Valley"--