Appalachian Mountains

The Appalachian Mountains, often called the Appalachians, are a mountain range in eastern to northeastern North America. The term "Appalachian" refers to several different regions and mountain systems associated with the mountain range, and its surrounding terrain. The general definition used is one followed by the United States Geological Survey and the Geological Survey of Canada to describe the respective countries' physiographic regions. The U.S. uses the term Appalachian Highlands and Canada uses the term Appalachian Uplands; the Appalachian Mountains are not synonymous with the Appalachian Plateau, which is one of the seven provinces of the Appalachian Highlands.
The Appalachian range runs from the Island of Newfoundland in Canada, southwestward to Central Alabama in the United States; south of Newfoundland, it crosses the 96-square-mile archipelago of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, an overseas collectivity of France, meaning it is technically in three countries. The highest peak of the mountain range is Mount Mitchell in North Carolina at, which is also the highest point in the United States east of the Mississippi River.
The range is older than the other major mountain range in North America, the Rocky Mountains of the west. Some of the outcrops in the Appalachians contain rocks formed during the Precambrian. The geologic processes that led to the formation of the Appalachian Mountains started 1.1 billion years ago. The first mountain range in the region was created when the continents of Laurentia and Amazonia collided, creating a supercontinent called Rodinia. The collision of these continents caused the rocks to be folded and faulted, creating the first mountains in the region. Many of the rocks and minerals that were formed during that event can currently be seen at the surface of the present Appalachian range. Around 480 million years ago, geologic processes began that led to three distinct orogenic eras that created much of the surface structure seen in today's Appalachians. During this period, mountains once reached elevations similar to those of the Alps and the Rockies before natural erosion occurred over the last 240 million years leading to what is present today.
The Appalachian Mountains are a barrier to east–west travel, as they form a series of alternating ridgelines and valleys oriented in opposition to most highways and railroads running east–west. This barrier was extremely important in shaping the expansion of the United States in the colonial era.
The range is the home of a very popular recreational feature, the Appalachian Trail. This is a hiking trail that runs all the way from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Springer Mountain in Georgia, passing over or past a large part of the Appalachian range. The International Appalachian Trail is an extension of this hiking trail into the Canadian portion of the Appalachian range in New Brunswick and Quebec.

Etymology

While exploring inland along the northern coast of Florida in 1528, the members of the Narváez expedition, including Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, found a Native American village near present-day Tallahassee, Florida, whose name they transcribed as Apalchen or Apalachen. The name was soon altered by the Spanish to Apalachee and used as a name for the tribe and region spreading well inland to the north. Pánfilo de Narváez's expedition first entered Apalachee territory on June 15, 1528, and applied the name. Now spelled "Appalachian", it is the fourth-oldest surviving European place-name in the US.
After the 1540 expedition of Hernando de Soto, Spanish cartographers began to apply the name of the tribe to the mountains themselves. The first cartographic appearance of Apalchen is on Diego Gutiérrez's map of 1562; the first use for the mountain range is the map of Jacques le Moyne de Morgues in 1565.
File:Gutierrez-1562-detail-app1.jpg|thumb|Diego Gutiérrez's 1562 map of the Western Hemisphere showing the first known use of a variation of the place name Appalachia from his map, Americae sive qvartae orbis partis nova et exactissima descriptio
The name was not commonly used for the whole mountain range until the late 19th century. A competing and often more popular name was the "Allegheny Mountains", "Alleghenies", and even "Alleghania". In the early 19th century, Washington Irving proposed renaming the United States either Appalachia or Alleghania.
In U.S. dialects in most regions of the Appalachians, the word is pronounced, with the third syllable sounding like "latch". In some northern parts of the mountain range, particularly Pennsylvania, it is pronounced or ; the third syllable is like "lay", and the fourth "chins" or "shins". There is often great debate between the residents of the regions regarding the correct pronunciation. Elsewhere, a commonly accepted pronunciation for the adjective Appalachian is, with the last two syllables "-ian" pronounced as in the word "Romanian".

Geography

Perhaps partly because the range runs through large portions of both the United States and Canada, and partly because the range was formed over numerous geologic time periods, one of which is sometimes termed the Appalachian orogeny, writing communities struggle to agree on an encyclopedic definition of the mountain range. However, each of the governments has an agency that informs the public about the major landforms that make up the countries, the United States Geological Survey and the Geological Survey of Canada. The landforms are referred to as physiographic regions. The regions create precise boundaries from which maps can be drawn. The Appalachian Highlands is the name of one of the eight physiographic regions of the contiguous 48 United States.
The Appalachian Uplands is the name of one of seven physiographic regions of Canada.

Appalachian Highlands of the United States

The second level in the physiographic classification schema for the USGS is "province", the same word as Canada uses to divide its political subdivisions, meaning that the terminology used by the two countries do not match below the region level. The lowest level of classification is "section".

Appalachian Uplands of Canada

The Appalachian Uplands are one of the seven physiographic divisions in Canada. Canada's GSC does not use the same classification system as the USGS below the division level. The agency does break the divisions of the Appalachian Uplands into 13 subsections that are in four different political provinces of Canada.
While the Appalachian Highlands and Appalachian Uplands are generally continuous across the U.S./Canadian border, the St. Lawrence Valley area is handled differently in the physiographic classification schemas. The part of the St. Lawrence Valley in the United States is one of the second-level classifications, part of the Appalachian Highlands. In Canada, the area is part of the first-level classification, the St. Lawrence Lowlands. This includes the area around the city of Montreal, Anticosti Island, and the northwest coastline of Newfoundland.
The dissected plateau area, while not actually made up of geological mountains, is popularly called "mountains", especially in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, and while the ridges are not high, the terrain is extremely rugged. In Ohio and New York, some of the plateau has been glaciated, which has rounded off the sharp ridges and filled the valleys to some extent. The glaciated regions are usually referred to as hill country rather than mountains.

Range characteristics

The Appalachian belt includes the plateaus sloping southward to the Atlantic Ocean in New England, and southeastward to the border of the coastal plain through the central and southern Atlantic states; and on the northwest, the Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus declining toward the Great Lakes and the interior plains. A remarkable feature of the belt is the longitudinal chain of broad valleys, including the Great Appalachian Valley, which in the southerly sections divides the mountain system into two unequal portions, but in the northernmost lies west of all the ranges possessing typical Appalachian features, and separates them from the Adirondack group. The mountain system has no axis of dominating altitudes, but in every portion, the summits rise to rather uniform heights, and, especially in the central section, the various ridges and intermontane valleys have the same trend as the system itself. None of the summits reaches the region of perpetual snow.
In Pennsylvania, there are over sixty summits that rise over ; the summits of Mount Davis and Blue Knob rise over. In Maryland, Eagle Rock and Dans Mountain are conspicuous points reaching respectively. On the same side of the Great Valley, south of the Potomac, are the Pinnacle and Pidgeon Roost. In West Virginia, more than 150 peaks rise above, including Spruce Knob, the highest point in the Allegheny Mountains. A number of other points in the state rise above. Cheat Mountain at Thorny Flat and Bald Knob are among the more notable peaks in West Virginia.
The Blue Ridge Mountains, rising in southern Pennsylvania and there known as South Mountain, attain elevations of about in Pennsylvania. South Mountain achieves its highest point just below the Mason-Dixon line in Maryland at Quirauk Mountain and then diminishes in height southward to the Potomac River. Once in Virginia, the Blue Ridge again reaches and higher. In the Virginia Blue Ridge, the following are some of the highest peaks north of the Roanoke River: Stony Man, Hawksbill Mountain, Apple Orchard Mountain and Peaks of Otter. South of the Roanoke River, along the Blue Ridge, are Virginia's highest peaks including Whitetop Mountain and Mount Rogers, the highest point in the Commonwealth.
Chief summits in the southern section of the Blue Ridge are located along two main crests, the Western or Unaka Front along the Tennessee-North Carolina border and the Eastern Front in North Carolina, or one of several "cross ridges" between the two main crests. Major subranges of the Eastern Front include the Black Mountains, Great Craggy Mountains, and Great Balsam Mountains, and its chief summits include Grandfather Mountain near the Tennessee-North Carolina border, Mount Mitchell in the Blacks, and Black Balsam Knob and Cold Mountain in the Great Balsams. The Western Blue Ridge Front is subdivided into the Unaka Range, the Bald Mountains, the Great Smoky Mountains, and the Unicoi Mountains, and its major peaks include Roan Mountain in the Unakas, Big Bald and Max Patch in the Bald Mountains, Kuwohi, Mount Le Conte, and Mount Guyot in the Great Smokies, and Big Frog Mountain near the Tennessee-Georgia-North Carolina border. Prominent summits in the cross ridges include Waterrock Knob in the Plott Balsams. Across northern Georgia, numerous peaks exceed, including Brasstown Bald, the state's highest, at Rabun Bald. In north-central Alabama, Mount Cheaha rises prominently to over its surroundings, as part of the southernmost spur of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

State or Province	Country	Physiographic Area	Highest Peak	Elev.	Elev.	Geographic Coordinates
Alabama	USA	Appalachian Plateau	Cheaha Mountain	2,407	734	33.4869° N 85.8091° W
Georgia	USA	Blue Ridge	Brasstown Bald	4,784	1,457	34.8745° N 83.8063° W
Kentucky	USA	Appalachian Plateau	Black Mountain	4,145	1,263	36.9022° N 82.9144° W
Maine	USA	New England	Mount Katahdin	5,269	1,606	45.9046° N 68.9216° W
Maryland	USA	Appalachian Plateau	Backbone Mountain	3,360	1,024	39.4049° N 79.2911° W
Massachusetts	USA	New England	Mount Greylock	3,489	1,063	42.3813° N 73.0957° W
New Brunswick	Canada	Chaleur Uplands	Mount Carleton	2,690	820	47.2241° N 66.5233 ° W
Newfoundland	Canada	Newfoundland	The Cabox	2,664	812	48.4959° N 58.2903° W
New Hampshire	USA	New England	Mount Washington	6,288	1,917	44.1614° N 71.1811° W
New Jersey	USA	Valley and Ridge	High Point	1,804	550	41.3206° N 74.6616° W
New York	USA	Adirondacks	Mount Marcy	5,344	1,629	44.1126° N 73.9235° W
North Carolina	USA	Blue Ridge	Mount Mitchell	6,684	2,037	35.7658° N 82.2655° W
Nova Scotia	Canada	Nova Scotia Highlands	White Hill	1,755	535	46.7555° N 60.6350° W
Ohio	USA	Appalachian Plateau	Campbell Hill	1,549	472	40.3888° N 83.6381° W
Pennsylvania	USA	Appalachian Plateau	Mount Davis	3,213	979	39.7866° N 79.1751° W
Quebec	Canada	Notre Dame Mountains	Mont Jacques-Cartier	4,160	1,268	48.9906° N 65.9425° W
South Carolina	USA	Blue Ridge	Sassafras Mountain	3,553	1,083	35.0632° N 82.3062° W
Tennessee	USA	Blue Ridge	Kuwohi	6,643	2,025	35.5625° N 83.4989° W
Vermont	USA	Green Mountains	Mount Mansfield	4,395	1,340	44.5439° N 72.8143° W
Virginia	USA	Blue Ridge	Mount Rogers	5,729	1,746	36.6586° N 81.5438° W
West Virginia	USA	Appalachian Plateau	Spruce Knob	4,863	1,482	38.6992° N 79.5327° W