Canada Once Had Mountains Nearly as Tall as the Himalayas

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Long before the Rockies or the modern landscape of Canada existed, a huge mountain-building event raised the Laurentian Mountains in what is now Quebec. Parks Canada says the rocks beneath La Mauricie National Park were formed deep underground under intense heat and pressure, then pushed upward about 955 million years ago as the Laurentian mountains broke through the crust. The mountains may have reached heights comparable to the Himalayas. Over hundreds of millions of years, weathering and erosion gradually wore the range down, leaving behind much lower rocky landscapes and deeply altered rock formations. Later, enormous continental glaciers reshaped the region again, flattening parts of the terrain and carving valleys and lakes. The story is a striking reminder that a familiar landscape can be the worn-down remains of something vastly larger that existed hundreds of millions of years earlier. Geological evidence across eastern North America also preserves the roots of ancient mountain belts created by plate collisions, showing how dramatically Earths surface can change over immense stretches of time.