The Landscape of the Piedmont
This page is in its very beginning stages of construction and it mostly visual ramblings.
Map from the Wikimedia Commons
|
The word Piedmont comes from Old Italian pie di monte "foot of the mountains". In the Southeast, it is that land above the Fall Line and below the Blue Ridge escarpment and runs from northern New Jersey to Alabama.
The Piedmont is a rolling landscape ranging from about 200 feet elevation at the fall line to just above 1,000 feet at the Blue Ridge. Tectonically created over more than a billion years in five major geologic events, it is today characterized by their erosional remnants with the breakup of Pangaea leading to a diverging continental margin as North America and Africa continue to separate. With some 200 million years of erosion, a lot of material can be moved! I am most familiar with the Piedmont in Georgia and neighboring Alabama and South Carolina and have explored these areas pretty thoroughly on botanical excursions as well as simply travelling. |
Atlanta Georgia and the Piedmont
The view from the top of any of the monadnocks (isolated hills or small mountain rising from a flat plain), such as the City of Atlanta seen here from Kennesaw Mountain, would give anyone the very strong impression that this landscape is flat.
Looking north from almost the same location on a clear day one can see the rolling hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains with the flat Piedmont in the foreground.
The appearance of flat is deceiving, for if any ride a bike for more than a couple of miles in the Atlanta, that deception will disappear fast and the hills will give the legs quite a workout. In the area of my house in Marietta, the elevation ranges from 950 to 1,120 feet in less than half a mile, a 6.5 % slope! The topography is controlled by many things, but the last tectonic activity in this region is isostatic rebound where the crust of the earth is rising slowly as erosion takes, and has taken, away a large amount of mass.
Aside from urban sprawl, both of these photos illustrate that the Piedmont is a forested landscape. It is a highly altered landscape with 300+ years of "modern" human occupation. From Colonial to late 19th century days, farming was the mainstay of the economy and farming changes the landscape. A vast amount of the Piedmont today is basically "old field forest" where, with the change from a rural farming economy to urban and suburban sprawl, former cleared fields have been abandoned and loblolly pines come in to reclaim the land, only then to be cut down for urban needs. The flats surrounding Kennesaw Mountain are a mix of deciduous trees and loblolly, indicating they've been allowed to progress some ways from the pioneer pine forest to a climax mixed hardwood (mostly oak) forest.
This somewhat begs the question of what the pre-Columbian forest was. There is much disagreement and few places to look for clues. One thing seems certain, that loblolly pine was there and ready to repopulate the abandoned fields.
The appearance of flat is deceiving, for if any ride a bike for more than a couple of miles in the Atlanta, that deception will disappear fast and the hills will give the legs quite a workout. In the area of my house in Marietta, the elevation ranges from 950 to 1,120 feet in less than half a mile, a 6.5 % slope! The topography is controlled by many things, but the last tectonic activity in this region is isostatic rebound where the crust of the earth is rising slowly as erosion takes, and has taken, away a large amount of mass.
Aside from urban sprawl, both of these photos illustrate that the Piedmont is a forested landscape. It is a highly altered landscape with 300+ years of "modern" human occupation. From Colonial to late 19th century days, farming was the mainstay of the economy and farming changes the landscape. A vast amount of the Piedmont today is basically "old field forest" where, with the change from a rural farming economy to urban and suburban sprawl, former cleared fields have been abandoned and loblolly pines come in to reclaim the land, only then to be cut down for urban needs. The flats surrounding Kennesaw Mountain are a mix of deciduous trees and loblolly, indicating they've been allowed to progress some ways from the pioneer pine forest to a climax mixed hardwood (mostly oak) forest.
This somewhat begs the question of what the pre-Columbian forest was. There is much disagreement and few places to look for clues. One thing seems certain, that loblolly pine was there and ready to repopulate the abandoned fields.