Silver State Times

How old is the Sierra Nevada Mountain range? That is precisely the question a University of Nevada, Reno professor and a former doctoral student are trying to answer.

According to a news release issued by the university, the Peter Vardy Endowed Professor in Geologic Engineering Scott McCoy has conducted research on the topic.

“The Sierra has seen an incredible amount of study for hundreds of years,” McCoy said in the release.

McCoy was joined by Helen Beeson in publishing an article concerning the development of the Sierra.

According to McCoy: “Early mappers were fascinated by this mountain range because it’s an odd one. It has a precipitous eastern slope that drops steeply down to towns like Reno and Bishop, but a long western slope that gently approaches the lowlands around the Central Valley towns of Sacramento and Fresno. Gentle, that is, all except the canyons that cut deeply into the western slope. From the first day western people started recording observations, there was a controversy of how the range reached the current state.”

Due to vast time ranges that can range hundreds of millions of years, many scientists have differing opinions on the age of the mountain range. However, McCoy said he studied rivers on the western side of the Sierra and found that mountains rose up within the last five to ten million years.  

According to McCoy: “The controversy continues today in a slightly more nuanced way of saying there are lots of mechanisms that might have brought this mountain range high, but many of them are very, very old. There was unquestionably a big mountain range there for a long time.”