Morgan Young

Intro The time is 756 million years ago. Rodinia, one of the most recent supercontinents, reigns supreme over Earth. It’s a huge amalgamation of all the continents from that time and it forms a huge single landmass floating in a single great ocean. However, its days are numbered as the first signs of rifting appear, which will in the end tear apart the massive supercontinent. After the invention of the time machine, you, a graduate student, and your professor, the geologist Morgan Young, decide to go back in time into an incredibly ancient period in Earth’s history: the late Proterozoic Eon. With an infectious joy, Morgan Young has an insatiable curiosity for the world around her, and she’s determined to study the processes that led to the breakup of the massive supercontinent Rodinia. You decide to start at the Grand Canyon, since it was likely very close to where the rifting eventually started (everything west of it likely was smooshed onto North America later), and when you arrive, you find yourself in a landscape devoid of life with roughly parallel strips of mountains and valleys. There’s no life here because life had yet to move onto land, and the mountains and valleys were formed from the stresses as a hotspot from the mantle began to start slowly breaking the supercontinent apart: the ground stretched under the stress and cracked over time, causing some of the land, the valleys, to fall down a bit while the parts that didn’t became the mountains around you. These valleys and the rocks that made them up later became the slanted layers of the Grand Canyon Supergroup still visible today, so you can’t help but feel like you’re witnessing the formation of some of the layers of the Grand Canyon in real time, which is indeed true in a sense. Felling like you’re directly experiencing the processes that made the Earth what it is today, the two of you get to work investigating the effects of the forces that tear even the biggest continents apart, what will you find?