May 7, 2023 - Great Smoky Mountains

Great Smoky
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The tall ridges of the Great Smoky Mountains stretch across present-day
North Carolina and Tennessee, although they predate the formation of
the United States by millions of years. According to the United States
Geological Survey (USGS), the mountains were formed between 200 and 300
million years ago, through uplift of the entire Appalachian region when
ancestral North America and Africa collided as part of the formation of
the supercontinent Pangea. The massive uplift caused folding and
faulting as the mountains formed, as well as earthquakes and a great
deal of heat. At first, the mountains likely reached higher than the
Rocky Mountains do today, but the forces of weathering and erosion over
many millions of years, as well as the changes caused by breakup of
Pangea, has left only a remnant core of the soaring mountains that
stood as recently 100 million years ago.

Today, most of the area is protected as Great Smoky Mountains National
Park, which covers 522,427 acres divided nearly evenly between
Tennessee and North Carolina. The crest of the Great Smokies now runs
in an unbroken chain of peaks that rise more than 5,000 feet for over
36 miles. Elevations in the park range from 876 to 6,643 feet. The
tallest mountains are Clingman’s Dome, which rises to 6,643 feet,
followed by Mount Guyot (6,621 feet), and Mount Le Conte (6,593 feet).

In 2022, the Great Smoky National Park was the third most-visited
location in the National Park System, following closely behind the
nearby Blue Ridge Parkway and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area,
located in California. Weekends in summer draw heavy crowds on roads
and popular trails, although solitude may still be found in more remote
locations, especially in the winter. The beauty of the region also
draws people to live in cities and towns close to the park boundaries.
While the increasing human use and climate change bring challenges to
the ecosystem, natural life in the park remains abundant and quite
diverse.

In 1998, scientists began a biological inventory of all life forms
within the park. Since that time, nearly 10,000 species have been
discovered living within the park that had previously been unknown in
the region. About 1,000 of these were new species, having never been
identified anywhere on Earth before. The extraordinary diversity of
this park led to the park’s designation as a United Nations World
Heritage Site and International Biosphere Reserve.

On May 4, 2023, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer
(MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a true-color image
centered on the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The folded nature
of the mountain ridges is most easily seen on the northwestern slope,
where white spots of “popcorn clouds” dot the skies. A group of gray
pixels, arranged like a spider web on the northwestern apex of the arc
formed by the mountains is Knoxville, Tennessee. In the green forests
on the eastern slopes, the city of Asheville, North Carolina, is marked
by a ring of gray pixels with gray lines (roads) extending outward.
Both of these cities sit well outside park boundaries. Additional gray
pixels in the southeast mark human development along Interstate 85 in
North Carolina and South Carolina.

Image Facts
Satellite: Terra
Date Acquired: 5/4/2023
Resolutions: 1km (177.8 KB), 500m (491.4 KB), 250m (1004.2
KB)
Bands Used: 1,4,3
Image Credit: MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC



https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/individual.php?db_date=2023-05-07

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