Oklahoma Almost Had An Ocean Running Through The Middle Of It

Most people drive past the Wichita Mountains without realizing they’re looking at one of the strangest geological accidents in North America.

Not just old mountains either. Ancient. Like “older than trees, dinosaurs, and basically every creature you picture when somebody says prehistoric” old.

If you've ever taken in the short movie at the Wichita Mountains visitors center, it talks a little bit about the mountains, but it mainly focuses on the refuge and animals.

To catch you up, they formed around 500 million years ago during something called the Southern Oklahoma Aulacogen, which sounds a heck of a lot fancier than what it was. It was when Oklahoma tried to rip the continent apart.

Seriously.

A massive continental rift began forming across what is now southern Oklahoma during a period when the Earth’s crust was stretching and cracking open. Magma pushed upward. Huge volcanic activity exploded across the region. The land started trying to split apart the same way East Africa and Greenland are today.

If the rift had actually succeeded?

There’s a decent chance an ocean could exist right through the middle of Oklahoma today.

The Gulf of Oklahoma

But, and I'm sure you're already here, the rift failed.

Geologists actually call it a “failed rift." The crust stretched, cracked, and caused absolute chaos for millions of years... then just stopped before fully separating the continent.

The aftermath left behind the Wichita Mountains, along with huge underground formations of granite, gabbro, and other volcanic rock that cooled deep beneath the surface before eventually being exposed over enormous stretches of time.

That’s also what makes the Wichitas different from the other mountains across Oklahoma.

Why The Wichita Mountains Look Different

The Ozarks in eastern Oklahoma are mostly uplifted plateaus shaped by erosion, and the Ouachitas were folded by compression.

The Wichita Mountains are different beasts entirely. They were born from volcanic activity and deep crust fractures tied to a continent literally trying to tear itself in half.

That’s why they look so different, and despite all of that, the mountains we see today are actually just the worn-down roots of something much larger. Geologists believe the original mountains may have once rivaled the Rockies in height before hundreds of millions of years of erosion shaved them down into the lower-profile range we enjoy today.

Oklahoma’s oldest mountains are basically the leftovers of a failed continental breakup, ancient volcanoes, and half a billion years of the planet slowly sanding everything down grain by grain.

Not bad for "flyover" territory.