Have you ever wondered how mountain ranges were formed? Or exactly how continents were put together?

Helen Lang, an associate professor in the Department of Geology and Geography in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University, recently received an $86,000 collaborative, two-year grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct research aimed at answering questions about North Americas geological history.

Lang and colleagues from the University of Idaho and Washington State University will be studying rocks in northern Idaho to understand how the northwestern part of the North Americanbasementwas assembled. The continent rests on blocks of very old rock of differing ages.

Our research will provide important background about a part of North America that can be related to similar studies in other areas,said Lang.This research contributes to our mission in the Department of Geology and Geography and enhances the national profile and visibility of WVU with people from other institutions.

The research team will be using new, cutting-edge techniques to determine the age of individual grains of garnet and possibly different zones of the same garnet. Lang will sample garnet-bearing metamorphosed shales, study the microscopic relationship of garnets to other minerals in the rock and choose garnets to date.

Garnet, often used in sandpaper, is a key mineral used in interpreting the origins of metamorphic rocks�€rocks which have undergone dramatic change brought about by temperature, pressure or fluids. These changes are often caused by mountain building events and can provide details about when continental collision occurred. Pinpointing the time the rocks changed is important to understanding Earths geological history.

Langs project,Constraining the Timing and Nature of Proterozoic Metamorphism in the Northwest U.S. Cordillera,will expand on earlier studies that showed metamorphic rocks in northern Idaho are much older than previously thought, dating from 1.2 billion years in the Proterozoic eon. The Proterozoic eon lasted from 2.5 billion to 542 million years ago, predating Earths first abundant complex life.

We currently dont know as much as we would like about the very ancient history of North America,Lang noted.Until recently, we did not suspect there were mountain building events affecting western North America 1.2 billion years ago.

The WVU professor has been recognized with the American Federation of Mineralogical Societies (AFMS) Scholarship Foundations2003 Honorary Award.

Lang and a WVU graduate student will spend two weeks next summer collecting rock samples in northern Idaho. Research on these samples will continue on the microscope in her lab at Brooks Hall in preparation for measuring the composition of minerals on an electron microprobe and dating garnets at Washington State University.