The Scottish Highlands, the Appalachians, Atlas are the same mountain range
14 comments
·December 18, 2025biomcgary
librasteve
surely you mean overbearing English, old man?
al_borland
I visited Scotland last year. They bring this up a lot on tours. Some of the distilleries also bought land in the Appalachian region to grow trees to make future whiskey casks.
shagie
And if you want to hike it, you've got the International Appalachian Trail... https://iat-sia.org/the-trail/
tengwar2
I'm finding it difficult to believe that map relates to the title. It's not showing just the Scottish Highlands (roughly speaking the north-west half of Scotland), but the whole of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, plus about half of England, including the famously flat Lincolnshire fens.
nephihaha
Didn't know about the Atlas, but I knew northern Scotland and Nova Scotia shared a lot of geology.
Tagbert
The southern end of the Atlas, the Anti-Atlas range, is from the same formation as the Appalachans. The rest of the Atlas came from a different (later?) event.
trgn
atlas remain very high though. so what's different there that they're not eroded?
wahern
I've been nerd sniped. Per Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Mountains
> In the Paleogene and Neogene Periods (~66 million to ~1.8 million years ago), the mountain chains that today constitute the Atlas were uplifted, as the land masses of Europe and Africa collided at the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula.
But it also notes,
> The Anti-Atlas Mountains are believed to have originally been formed as part of the Alleghenian orogeny. These mountains were formed when Africa and America collided
Anti-Atlas? If we jump over to the Anti-Atlas article we see,
> In some contexts, the Anti-Atlas is considered separate from the Atlas Mountains system, as the prefix "anti" (i.e. opposite) implies.
and
> The summits of the Anti-Atlas reach average heights of 2,500–2,700 m (8,200–8,900 ft),
So in addition to subsequent events, the portion of the Atlas originally formed with the Appalachian is geologically distinguishable from the other portions of the Atlas chain, and actually significantly lower than the parts of the chain formed later, though not as low as the Appalachians.
adolph
The Scottish Highlands are also significant to contemporary understanding of geology.
brcmthrowaway
Where do the himalayas fit in all this?
voxleone
The Himalayas formed because the Indian craton moved exceptionally fast northward (all the way from Antarctica) and collided with Eurasia, one of the fastest sustained plate motions known in geological history.
The collision with Asia began around 50–55 Ma and is still ongoing, which is why the Himalayas are still rising today.
nkrisc
They don’t.
turtlesdown11
They're also mountain ranges formed from the collision of plates? Otherwise, nothing, the timelines of the formation of the Himalayas and the Appalachians are hundreds of millions of years apart.
This explains the Scotch-Irish settling in Appalachia. It felt like home, but without the overbearing Brits nearby.