If you could slice America open from east to west, you would see a country built in giant stripes: old rounded mountains near the Atlantic, a vast flat middle, young jagged mountains in the west, and sun-baked deserts in the south-west corner. Each stripe shapes how millions of people live.
Two great mountain ranges — one old, one young
America has two famous mountain chains, and they could hardly be more different.
| Appalachians (east) | Rocky Mountains (west) | |
|---|---|---|
| Age | Very old — hundreds of millions of years | Young — tens of millions of years |
| Shape | Low, rounded, forested | Tall, jagged, snow-capped |
| Highest peak | Mount Mitchell, about 2,037 m | Mount Elbert, about 4,401 m |
Why the difference? Erosion. Wind, water and ice have had hundreds of millions of years to grind the Appalachians down into gentle rounded ridges. The Rockies are geological youngsters, so they still stand tall and sharp.
The Great Plains: America's breadbasket
Between the two ranges stretches the Great Plains — an ocean of flat and gently rolling grassland with deep, rich soil. This is the nation's breadbasket: enormous farms here grow wheat, maize (Americans say corn) and other grains that feed the country and are shipped around the world. The flatness that makes farming easy also gives storms room to run — this is the heart of 'Tornado Alley'.
The desert Southwest and the Grand Canyon
The south-west corner of the country is desert land — states like Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada get little rain and blazing summers. Here water becomes an artist: over millions of years the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon in Arizona, a gorge about 446 km long and over 1.6 km deep. Standing on its rim, you look down through layer after layer of rock — like reading the pages of Earth's diary.
The two extremes: Death Valley and Denali
Highest and coldest: Denali in Alaska soars to about 6,190 m, the tallest peak in all of North America. Its name comes from the Koyukon people's language and means 'the tall one' — a perfect description.
How landscape shapes where people live
Notice the pattern: the crowded cities hug the coasts and rivers; farm towns dot the Plains; mountain regions stay thinly populated; and desert cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas only boomed once engineers piped in water and air conditioning arrived. Wherever people settle in America, the landscape got a vote first.