Alberta - Why Does Alberta Have Badlands?
This week we explore the origin of one of Canada’s most beautiful landscapes by going back millions of years.
EPISODE NOTES
People sassed me for referring to the well-paved, multi-lane roads leading from Brooks to the lookout as ‘backroads’. Touché.
Even more people sassed me about my embarrassing parking job. I considered arguing that when they gave me a Dodge Charger at the rental place (I’d asked for a tiny economy car but they were all out) they made me sign a piece of paper saying I would park it like that. Or: that was me gaming engagement with subtle rage-bait. In truth: I was the only car in that lot and wasn’t paying attention, but I did fix it once I noticed what I’d done.
The coyotes were genuinely nerve-wracking.
I don’t go into it in the video but ‘hoodoos’ are cool. They’re a rock formation that results when you have a relatively hard rock at the top (a ‘cap rock’), but softer rock below that gets more easily eroded, resulting in a spire or a mushroom shape. Weirdly, the name most likely comes from ‘voodoo’, the West African religion, likely because it connects magic with unique natural features.
TRANSCRIPT
My first morning in Alberta and I am up before the sun with a plan. I’m heading out from the town of Brooks, to a very particular spot about 35km away.
The pre-dawn drive winds through these eerie, misty backroads to a lonely little parking lot at the edge of a drop-off. That’s where I’ll set up to catch the sun rising over a stunning vista stretching all the way to the horizon.
Or, in theory. When I get there, visibility is like, twenty feet. That stunning vista is a wall of fog and a chorus of coyotes that feels like it’s surrounding me rises up out of it.
As the minutes tick by I really start to believe the whole morning is just gonna be a dull grey write-off. But that’s when, miraculously, the sun starts to crest the horizon, burn off the fog, and like a perfect showman pulls the curtain back on this.
Dinosaur Provincial Park, in the heart of the Canadian Badlands. It’s some of the most beautiful and unique terrain in the country. Sharply stratified rock carved into canyons, peaks, hoodoos and every kind of curving, flowing feature in between. 90,000 square kilometers, an area bigger than Portugal.
And seeing it just drop away like this from the expanse of flat prairies really makes you wonder: why is it here? How did Alberta end up with this self-contained, bizarre geology? Well - it wasn’t easy. The process that gave birth to the badlands started 75 million years ago.
Back then North America is a very different place. For one thing, it’s two places. Laramidia and Appalachia, split by the Western Interior Seaway. And Alberta is either submerged or covered in tropical forests.
Countless mountain streams and rivers pull sediments with them as they flow down from the prehistoric rockies and converge at the shores of the seaway. Here, the future site of the badlands, they deposit those sediments, layer by layer by layer over millions of years.
So, that tells us where this gorgeous stratification came from. But it’s one thing to build those layers up. It’ll take a very different world to carve them back down. One that existed 13,000 years ago. The Cretaceous tropics are now the great Laurentide Ice Sheet, covering Canada with ice up to 3.2 kilometers thick.
But the ice age is coming to and end. That massive reservoir is starting to warm up. The torrent of meltwater will reshape Canada from coast to coast, including here in Alberta where it’ll cut into those soft layers of sedimentary rock laid down millions of years earlier, carving the valleys and canyons of the badlands up to 80m deep.
And after that initial, dramatic exposure of the sedimentary layers at the end of the ice age, more subtle erosion has continued to carve the badlands into their current form through rain, wind and flowing water, leaving us with this constantly evolving tableau of geological features.
And the basin carved 13,000 years ago remains a waterway to this day. Fed by snowmelt and still a little bit of glacial runoff, it’s now the path of the Red Deer River.
So, that’s the origin of how this striking landscape came to be. A tag team effort of millions of years of sedimentary deposits, and the biggest ice melt in history bringing us to our present age.
Next time we’ll see how we started interacting with the badlands, and how they shape the ecology and wildlife of the region to this day.