What was the West like a thousand years ago, a million years ago — even a billion years ago? And how is that history still visible and consequential today? These were the driving questions behind the special project on deep time that High Country News published this month. (You can read the stories from the series here.)
We devoted our entire January print issue to the topic. For the cover image, we asked illustrator Alex Boersma to create a stylized geologic timescale of Earth focused specifically on the landscapes, flora and fauna of the Western United States.
From the swampy temperate forests that flourished here more than 300 million years ago and eventually formed many of the region’s coal deposits to the Colorado River beginning to carve the Grand Canyon just 5-6 million years ago — the blink of an eye in geologic time — the resulting illustration highlights many elements of the West’s rich geologic past. The annotated version of the image below shows its connections to stories from the Deep Time in the West project. Tap or click on select annotations to dig into this vast history:
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