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A cordillera is a small chain and/or network system of mountain ranges, such as those in the west coast of the Americas. The term is borrowed from Spanish , where the word comes from cordilla , a diminutive of cuerda ('rope').
The North American Cordillera extends from the U.S. state of Alaska to the southern border of Mexico, and includes some of the highest peaks on the continent. [5] Its mountain ranges generally run north to south along three main belts: the Pacific Coast Ranges in the west, the Nevadan belt in the middle (including the Sierra Nevada ), and the ...
The American Cordillera (/ ˌ k ɔːr d əl ˈ j ɛ r ə / KOR-dəl-YERR-ə) is a chain of mountain ranges (cordilleras), consisting of an almost continuous sequence of mountain ranges that form the western "backbone" of the Americas. [2] Aconcagua is the highest peak of the chain.
The rocky cores of the mountain ranges are, in most places, formed of pieces of continental crust that are over one billion years old. In the south, an older mountain range was formed 300 million years ago, then eroded away. The rocks of that older range were reformed into the Rocky Mountains.
The Cordilleran mountains were formed by the collision of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates causing the crust to buckle, creating the mountain ranges that are known today. This is the youngest of the three primary geographic regions of Canada, the others being the Canadian Shield and Interior Plains.
On a map showing only volcanic rocks, the west coast of North America shows a striking continuous north–south structure, the American Cordillera. The North American Cordillera extends up and down the coast of North America and roughly from the Great Plains westward to the Pacific Ocean , narrowing somewhat from north to south.
The Pacific Coast Ranges are part of the North American Cordillera (sometimes known as the Western Cordillera, or in Canada, as the Pacific Cordillera and/or the Canadian Cordillera), which includes the Rocky Mountains, the Columbia Mountains, the Interior Mountains, the Interior Plateau, the Sierra Nevada, the Great Basin mountain ranges, and ...
They form part of the American Cordillera, an essentially continuous sequence of mountain ranges that runs all the way from Alaska to the very tip of South America. The Cordillera, in turn, is the eastern part of the Pacific Ring of Fire that runs all the way around the Pacific Ocean. View of Lake Louise in Alberta