Monday, April 15th, Brixen, Italy

 

Greetings!

Today is Dolomite Day.  What, you ask, is a Dolomite?  It's a calcium and magnesium filled rock layer, white/grey in color, on the south side of the Tyrolean Alps in Northern Italy.  

Let me tell you how it got there.  Sometime between 400 million and 500 million years ago, Earth's land was clustered at the South Pole, where water first appeared and seas originated.  Early tectonic upheavals resulted in erosion deposited on seafloors, as well as the shells of sea and seashore life.  The weight of the deposited materials in successive layers of sea floor created a thick impermeable section of rock now referred to as sedimentary.   

Over the next 200 million years, when the land from the South Pole spiraled north and broke up into the continents, the group which we know now as North America, Europe, and Africa rode up and over a giant super craton now under the Congo, Europe halted and Africa continued north into it.  The resulting 30 million year continental collision pushed up the mountain range which became the Alps and Atlas mountains, and split off the North American continent containing the Appalachian Mountains across the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.  Before being released to continue northward, the seabed behind the Alps was forced upward to become the Dolomites and accompany Europe on its journey.

Our local guide, Evan, took eight hardy hikers on a mid-mountain trail for a couple of hours for better views of the Dolomites, while the others were bussed to a cafe at the trail's end.  Reunited, we all traveled to an 800-year old mountain farmhouse for a South Tyrolean lunch and one last view before the clouds covered the jagged peaks.

To see all of the photos taken today, Click on Monday, April 15th Brixen, Italy.