Prairie. Candace Savage

extends to an average depth of 25 to 30 miles (40 to 45 kilometers). Yet this comparatively short vertical distance takes us back in time some 3.8 billion years, to an era when the flying debris of creation had begun to subside and the Earth’s crust was finally able to stabilize. In this remote and inhospitable age, we find the first traces of life—microscopic stains, a few microns long, made by filaments of cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae.

      Rocks from this primordial era lie right out in the open on the Precambrian Shield, but they seldom break through to the surface of the Great Plains. Instead, these ancient formations generally lie a few miles beneath our feet, providing the foundation, or “basement rock,” on which the prairies have been built. Our region lies on what geologists call the North American craton, or the stable core of the continent. This is a large fragment of the Earth’s crust that sheared away from an unnamed supercontinent toward the end of the Precambrian Era. By the time this happened—some 600 million or 700 million years ago—the Earth (and the prairie region along with it) had already endured more than 3 billion years of mountain building, erosion, glaciation, deglaciation, and general geological Sturm und Drang. But things must have been starting to settle down, because when the supercontinent tore itself apart, it produced a North American continent-in-the-making that has persisted until the present.

      The Earth has sometimes been likened to a layer cake, in which ancient sediments are overlain by deposits from successive geological events, creating an ascending timeline from past to present.

      This infant continent was not exactly the land mass that we know today. The entire western Cordillera was missing, with the result that the west coast of the craton ran south through present-day British Columbia and the Pacific states (much closer to the prairies than it is today). At first, the cratonic land mass lay exposed—a low, eroding plain, as barren as the face of Mars. But, as the geological strife continued, sea levels began to rise and the land was gradually overrun by the ocean. In time, the entire continent (with the periodic exception of a chain of tropical islands that ran diagonally across the plains, from Lake Superior toward Arizona) had disappeared beneath the waves.

      For roughly the next 55 million years (from about 545 million to 490 million years ago), much of the North American craton lay under a shallow sea. Wherever the land remained exposed, it was eroded by water and wind, which ground the gritty Precambrian rocks into rounded grains of quartz sand. This sand was then swept to the coasts and out into the sea, where it settled to the bottom in beds tens to thousands of yards thick. Eventually, these lustrous sediments were overlain by layers of fine-grained mud. And whether sandy or silty, this ocean floor was literally crawling with life, particularly three-lobed, many-legged, bottom-feeding arthropods known as trilobites. After an agonizingly slow start with the cyanobacteria, evolution was finally hitting its stride, producing a menagerie of weird and wonderful undersea life. As generation upon generation of these animals lived and died, their remains settled onto the ocean floor, where they were buried under thick layers of sediments. Today these fossil-rich deposits—now compressed into solid sandstone and shale—are buried some 3 miles (5 kilometers) beneath the wheat fields of the northern plains and at lesser depths in other parts of the prairies. But in a few places—like the Judith and Little Rocky mountains and the northern Black Hills—they have been pushed up to the surface, exposing their maritime history to plain view.

       > GEOLOGICAL TIMESCALE

      When the Cambrian sea finally withdrew and dry land emerged again, the forces of erosion immediately began to tear away at the newly formed rocks. But soon, geologically speaking—after a break of little more than 20 million years—the water rose and slowly spread over the land. This time, even the transcontinental island chain was bathed in the warm, clear seas. Now primitive snails munched on algae and were themselves preyed upon by giant squid-like nautiloids, with shells up to a couple of yards in length. Hundreds of new species of shelled animals evolved, including crinoids, or “sea lilies” (distantly related to modern sea urchins), and exotic reef-forming corals. There was so much life in these oceans that when they finally withdrew some 440 million years ago, they left behind thick deposits of shell fragments and calcium-rich debris, which eventually solidified into fossil-rich limestones. These Late Ordovician deposits include the elegant Tyndall stone that is quarried in Manitoba and graces so many buildings in the Prairie provinces.

      Enchanted Rock, near Austin, Texas, was formed as a massive upwelling of molten rock during the Precambrian Era. The granite eventually solidified and now lies exposed by the eroding action of wind and water.

      Nautiloids

      Crinoid/sea lily

      And so things continued for about the next 100 million years, as shallow oceans advanced across the North America craton, only to withdraw and then flood back in. If the run and roll of the grasslands sometimes remind us of the sea, surely this is a result of the landscape’s long marine history. With every advance and retreat of the ocean, the land was burdened with fresh deposits of sand, silt, and crushed shells, which built up, year by year, in nearly horizontal, banded layers. Although some of these contrasting sea floors have since been exposed by erosion (where rivers have cut deeply down through the sediments), for the most part they lie thousands of feet beneath the grasslands.

      The oceans that left these deposits behind were hospitable to life—shallow, warm, well lit, and typically tropical. During the Silurian and Devonian periods in particular (between about 440 million and 355 million years ago), these waters provided ideal conditions for reef-forming sponges and corals. In what would one day become the Canadian Prairie provinces, the reef builders of the Devonian had a heyday, constructing barrier reefs and ringlike walls that rose to heights of 300 feet (100 meters). Wherever the sea was constricted by these limestone palisades, the water gradually became super-salty. If the circulation of the sea was inhibited, water lost to evaporation could not readily be replaced, and the concentration of salts steadily increased. In time, the salts precipitated out of the sea water in these areas, leaving thick beds of potash and other minerals, notably under present-day Saskatchewan. The potash deposits in Texas were formed by a similar process but some millions of years later, during the Permian Period.

      The last truly continentwide inundation withdrew from the North American craton about 300 million years ago. The next time the sea attempted to overrun the land—as it would continue to do for millions of years to come— it found itself lapping around the shores of a rocky upland that had started to rise in the eastern half of North America. Apparently, the asthenosphere had heated up and begun to force masses of molten rock up through rifts in the ocean floor. This event had sent the continental plates on a slow and perilous collision course. First, Europe smashed against North America from the northeast. Then a massive supercontinent called Gondwana (the combined land masses of South America, Africa, India, Antarctica, and Australia) crunched into North America from the south, causing the land to buckle and forcing the Appalachian Mountains to lift along the east coast. The forces involved in these mighty adjustments were even felt in the middle of the craton, where a range of mountains 3,000 feet (1,000 meters) high rose out of the plains of present-day Oklahoma and Colorado. Known as the Ancient Rockies, these mountains have since been eroded to their roots by the action of water and wind.

      Apart from the appearance of these new highlands, the west coast of the craton was comparatively untouched by these titanic collisions. Through all the commotion, the sea continued to wash up over the land, even splashing around the base of the Ancient Rockies and turning them into a cluster of south-sea islands.