Ancient Alabama journeys through 500 million years of the states history – AL.com

When I was in college in the early 2000s, I used to fly down I-20/59 between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham screaming along with the lyrics to the song Time by Pink Floyd.

At age 19, I thought the song was a sage and ancient wisdom from the distant past, warning us how quickly time can slip away. I considered it old.

The song was released in 1973. I debuted a few years later to much less international acclaim but with a small cadre of very devoted fans. The song then was younger than I am today.

The Ancient Alabama series covered almost 500 million years of the state's history.Graphic by Ramsey Archibald

In this series, Ancient Alabama, weve covered 500 million years or so of Alabamas history. That length of time calls for a new definition to the word old.

What is old? What is ancient? Were the first Alabamians -- who roamed the state 13,000 years ago alongside woolly mammoths and sabretooth cats -- ancient? We said yes. But thats only 13,000 years, hardly the blink of an eye in geologic time.

You have to go back about 4 million years just to get to megalodon, an ancient shark species that dwarfed any currently alive today.

What about the Appalachiosaurus, an Alabama tyrannosaur that was a distant cousin of the very famous T-rex? Thats definitely ancient and old, having roamed the state about 79 million years ago, around the same time that giant sea monsters called mosasaurs ruled the seas.

When laying out this series, we lumped Appalachiosaurus in around roughly the same time period as the Wetumpka meteorite strike, which happened 84 million years ago. I mean 79 million and 84 million, thats practically the same, right?

Its 5 million years apart.

The movement of continents forces us to try to imagine time on an even larger scale.

After all, Alabama was once mostly underwater and near the South Pole, before it meandered up north of the Equator at incredibly slow speeds.

Imagine pushing a boulder one inch per year. If you start in 2021, by 2050, youd have moved it a little over two feet. In a million years, thats about 16 miles. In 500 million years, you could push that boulder 7,891 miles, more than the distance from Birmingham to Antarctica.

Thats more or less the speed at which continents move, riding on currents of magma deep beneath the Earths surface.

About 323 million years ago, a continent called Gondwana, which contains what is now Africa and South America slammed into a landmass called Laurasia, which had North America, Europe, and parts of Asia.

I tend to think of that collision as especially violent, since it created mountains in Alabama that were in all likelihood higher than Mt. Everest is today. But really, it was a slow grinding collision that went on for more than 20 million years, peaking about 299 million years ago.

By the end of that collision, Pangaea had formed and suddenly Alabama was landlocked, with no coast for millions of years. Alabamas giant mountains eroded away to nothing and then were thrust upward again by new movements of the plates.

When those mountains were being thrust up, rocks that had been created as runoff into an ancient ocean and lay buried deep below the surface were suddenly at the top and being turned into dust by wind and water.

All of these things are definitely old, undoubtedly ancient, but still impact our lives today.

Some of Alabamas spectacular scenery -- Little River Canyon and the vast labyrinth of limestone caves in north Alabama -- were created by the push of the continental plates and the pull of slightly acidic water carving out canyons and chasms in soft limestone.

Mud and bacteria from 440 million years ago are why Birmingham had that magic mixture of iron ore, limestone and coal that allowed the South to gain its largest industrial center in the early 1900s.

The ocean runoff of eroding mountains in central Alabama during the dinosaur age created the chalky bedrock of Alabamas Black Belt, which made the area ideal for 19th century cotton plantations, but causes sewage nightmares for residents today.

The White Cliffs of Epes, near the town of Epes, Ala. on the Tombigbee River.Dennis Pillion

So how do we differentiate between Pink Floyd, Appalachiosaurus and Pangaea? Its a tricky concept and it can be hard to wrap your brain around whats just old and whats really and truly ancient.

Scientists have developed a classification system to help them talk about these blocks of time in an order that makes sense. Deep time is divided into eras, periods, and epochs spanning the millions of centuries, with names like Pleistocene, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Cambrian.

These make sense if you learn the code, or watch the right science fiction movies, but for many its just an abstract jumble of big words.

In this series, weve attempted to introduce the full depth and breadth of Alabamas geological history in a form thats more accessible than most geology textbooks. Weve really just scratched the surface.

We didnt even get to the Basilosaurus, Alabamas state fossil, or how the natural gas that funds our education system was created, or why the Tennessee River flows the way it does.

AL.com reporter Dennis Pillion at the Alabama Museum of Natural History.Dennis Pillion

So maybe next year therell be more of Ancient Alabama to explore.

But for now, I hope youve enjoyed these 12 journeys through the rich history of our state, the powerful forces that shaped where and how we live today, the detective work and occasional good luck needed to uncover the relics of ancient residents and map the lost mountains and even trace a cataclysmic meteorite impact in Alabama eons ago.

If youve missed any, the links are posted below.

If you want to learn more about these topics from the scientists, check out Jim Lacefields book Lost Worlds in Alabama Rocks, or Scot Duncans Southern Wonder: Alabamas Surprising Biodiversity. Theyre both essential reads for understanding why Alabama is such a unique and special place for the plants and animals that live here now and that lived here millions of years ago.

Thank you for reading.

Ancient Alabama

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Ancient Alabama journeys through 500 million years of the states history - AL.com