The other one is less intense than Yellowstone, and is at present centered under Raton, New Mexico. Volcanoes are at the surface there. The Raton plume has lifted the Texas panhandle, the southern Colorado high plains. Its easternmost lava flow is in western Oklal1oma. Its track, parallel to Yellowstone’s, includes the Jemez Caldera, above Los Alamos, and may have begun in the Pacific. To the question “What lifted the Colorado Plateau, the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountain platform?” the answer given by this theory is “The plumes of Raton and Yellowstone.” As Utah and Nevada crossed the hot spots, the zakelijke energie plumes are thought to have initiated the extensional faulting that has separated the sites of Reno and Salt Lake City by sixty miles in eight million years, breaking the earth into fault blocks and creating the physiographic province of the Basin and Range. Work done in the rock-dating laboratory of Richard Armstrong, a geochemist and geochronologist at the University of British Columbia, showed that Basin and Range faulting began at the western extreme of the region and moved eastward at a general rate of twenty-eight miles per million years-a frame commensurate in time and space with the continent’s progress over the hot spots now positioned under Yellowstone and Raton. The Tetons began to rise eight million years ago and are clearly not products of the Laramide Orogeny. They are a result of extensional faulting, and zakelijke energie vergelijken conform to hot-spot theory as the easternmost expression of the Basin and Range. The Colorado Plateau lies between the two hot-spot tracks, and Morgan believes that their combined influence is what lifted it, setting up the hydraulic energy that has etched out the canyonlands. How the plateau avoided the rifting and extension that went on all around it-why it, too, did not break into blocks-is a question that leaves him baffled. That the two hot spots, at any rate, are progressively lifting the country is a point reinforced by a remarkable observation: a line drawn between them is the Continental Divide. Inevitably, it has been suggested that someday North America may split apart along the Yellowstone perforations of the Snake River Plain. “That gives me a caution,” says David Love. “I think there are some problems there.