With enough burial, the muds became limestone, the sands became sandstone, the vegetation coal. When the sea fell, erosion wore away some of that, but then the sea would rise again to bury new generations of ferns and trees under successive layers of rock. These cyclothems, as they are called, contain the coals of Pennsylvania, and similar ones the coals of Iowa and Illinois. The shallow sea that reached into western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio was a hundred miles wide in the Missourian age of Pennsylvanian time, and after crossing the water you would have reached a beach and another coal swamp and then, in light-gray soil, a low lush tropical forest that went on through Indiana to eastern Illinois, where it ended with more coal swamps, another sea. The far shore was where the Mississippi River is now, and beyond that was an equatorial rain forest, which ended in central Iowa with another swamp, another sea. The water here was clear and zakelijke energie sparkling, with almost no land-derived sediments settling into it, just accumulating skeletons-clean deep beds of lime. Five hundred miles over the water, you would have raised the rose-colored beaches of eastern Wyoming. Mountains stood out to the south. They were the Ancestral Rockies, and time would bevel them to stumps. Skirting them, in Pennsylvanian Wyoming, you would have traversed what seem to have been Saharan sands, wave after wave of dunal sands, five hundred miles of rose and amber pastel sands, ending at the west coast of North America, in Salt Lake City. As the Pennsylvanian sea level moved up and down here, it left alternating beds of lime and sand, which, two eras later, the nascent Oquirrh Mountains would lift to view. Two hundred miles out to sea was the site of zakelijke energie vergelijken Carlin Canyon, where muds of clean lime were settling. The Stratheam, the younger formation of the two in the Carlin unconformity, is an almost pure limestone. The two formations, conjoined, were driven upward, according to present theory, in a collision of crustal plates that occurred in the early Triassic.