Ancient earthquakes: Scientists investigate fault line that helped shape Colorado’s Rocky Mountains

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Ryan Spencer/Summit Daily News A group of paleoseismologists – or scientists who study ancient earthquakes – work in a trench just off the Rainbow Lake Trail near Frisco on Friday, Sept. 6, 2024. The scientists are investigating the Gore Range fault in an effort to understand when the last earthquake occurred there.

While it is often said that mountains don’t move, in reality, the Colorado Rocky Mountains are the result of a slow dance that has been occurring beneath the earth’s surface for hundreds of millions of years.

The state’s mountains contain thousands of faults, where two blocks of rocks are fractured and move relative to each other, usually slowly but sometimes suddenly, causing earthquakes.

On Friday, Sept. 6, a group of U.S. Geological Survey scientists scraped and studied the inside of a freshly dug trench just off the Rainbow Lake Trail near Frisco in search of evidence of mountains moving…

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