Evidence suggests Montana’s Glacier Park may have been attached to Australia at one point

The rocks in Glacier’s mountains are absolutely fantastic most would agree. They reveal ancient seabeds and rivers and volcanic activity from billions of years ago, noted geologist Kurt Constenius, a Whitefish native and geologist with the University of Arizona.

During a talk last week at Glacier National Park’s Science and History Day, he went over some of the formations in Glacier, which date back to as long as 1.6 billion years ago and said that scientists believe that in one point in time, Glacier was likely connected to Australia, of all places.

At that time, North America was a much different place, a rather large land mass with huge drainages that once flowed north and then south. Eventually, the landscape rose up into mountains.

Geologists can track these shifts through studying the various rock formations and also through dating zircon crystals through their radioactivity.

Much of the geological record is fairly straightforward, but there’s a wildcard in all of it, Constenius said at the park’s science and history day last week. A formation known as the Sheppard uplift, which features black rock with cobbles, has a potential link to Australia, which is believed to have been at one point in the world’s history, attached to western Montana.

It will take some more digging, pardon the pun, to determine definitively if that’s the case.