Two hundred million years ago, Washington was two large islands, bits of continent on the move westward, eventually bumping up against the North American continent and calling it home. Even with their new fixed address, the shifting continues though subsiding laterally and continuing vertically. The force of these pressure strained plates continues to push seemingly immovable mountains skyward.This dynamic shifting has created the landscape we see today and helped form the fossil record that tells much of Washington’s relatively recent history of the past 50 million years.
