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The Canadian Prairies (usually referred to as simply the Prairies in Canada) is a region in Western Canada. It includes the Canadian portion of the Great Plains and the Prairie provinces, namely Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. [2] These provinces are partially covered by grasslands, plains, and lowlands, mostly in the southern regions.
Pangaea or Pangea (/ p æ n ˈ dʒ iː ə / pan-JEE-ə) [1] was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. [2] It assembled from the earlier continental units of Gondwana , Euramerica and Siberia during the Carboniferous approximately 335 million years ago, and began to break apart about 200 million years ...
Wet prairies may form in low-lying areas with poor drainage; dry prairie can be found on uplands or slopes. Dry prairie is the dominant habitat type in the Southern Canadian agricultural and climatic region which is known as Palliser's Triangle. It was once thought to be completely unarable, but is now one of the most important agricultural ...
The tallgrass prairie ecosystem covered some 170 million acres (690,000 km 2) of North America. Besides agriculture, much of the shortgrass prairie became grazing land for domestic livestock . Short grasslands occur in semi-arid climates while tall grasslands are in areas of higher rainfall.
Prairies on the eastern side of the Interior Plains are dominated by tall grass varieties including big bluestem and switchgrass. The two regions are separated by mixed-grass prairie, which contains both short and long grass varieties as well as little bluestem and western wheatgrass . [ 27 ]
The ecology of the Great Plains is diverse, largely owing to their great size. Differences in rainfall, elevation, and latitude create a variety of habitats including short grass, mixed grass, and tall-grass prairies, and riparian ecosystems.
During the Quaternary period, between 2 and 3 million years ago, the prairies were covered by a glacier, the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Northern hemisphere glaciation during the last ice ages. The accumulation of 3 to 4 kilometres (1.9 to 2.5 mi) thick ice sheets caused a sea level lowering of about 120 metres (390 ft)
The Central Atlantic magmatic province (CAMP) is the Earth's largest continental large igneous province, covering an area of roughly 11 million km 2.It is composed mainly of basalt that formed before Pangaea broke up in the Mesozoic Era, near the end of the Triassic and the beginning of the Jurassic periods.