About 30 million years ago North America began to override the East Pacific Rise, an oceanic spreading ridge. This activity placed a progressively longer segment of the coast in contact with the plate west of the ridge. The western plate—which contains the Coast Ranges of California—has been moving to the northwest relative to North America along the San Andreas Fault system. Active subduction and arc volcanism have been limited to the regions south (the Sierra Madre Occidental) and north (the Cascade Range) of the San Andreas system, which now extends from the Gulf of California in Mexico to Cape Mendocino in northern California. (An analogous gap in subduction and arc volcanism between northern Vancouver Island and the Gulf of Alaska is related to the Queen Charlotte–Fairweather Fault system.) To the east, crustal stretching and related volcanism has continued to shape the distinctive topography of the Basin and Range Province. The Colorado Plateau, however, has resisted the stretching that has occurred on three sides of it. East of the Cascade Range, a great flood of mantle-derived (basaltic) lava formed the Columbia Plateau between about 17 and 14 million years ago. Subsequently, the locus of magmatism migrated eastward, forming the Snake River basin and the active Yellowstone volcanic centre. This and other lesser volcanic tracks across the Cordilleras may be products of stationary mantle plumes overridden by the drifting continent. Uplift rates have increased in the past few million years in many parts of western North America, notably in the Sierra Nevada, the Colorado Plateau, the Coast Mountains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Great Plains, but the underlying causes are not well understood.

The past 2.5 million years

Continental ice sheets developed about 2.5 million years ago in North America, a date based on the appearance of ice-rafted debris in ocean-sediment cores. As glaciation began much earlier in Antarctica (about 37 million years ago), it is suspected that a specific causal factor—presumably involving a change in ocean-atmosphere circulation—was involved in addition to the overall global cooling trend related to the emergence of greater continental landmass over the past 70 million years. Proposed causes include establishment of the Isthmus of Panama and the increase of plateau uplifts in the western United States and Central Asia. From about 2.5 until about 1.0 million years ago, the ice sheets may not have reached as far south as the Great Lakes. According to oxygen-isotope records from ocean-sediment cores (the isotopic ratios are correlated with glacial ice volume), glaciation waxed and waned with a 41,000-year rhythm that corresponded to the variation in the proximity of Earth’s orbit to the Sun (the obliquity cycle), the effect of which is greater at higher latitudes. Almost 700,000 years ago, the maximum extent of the ice sheets reached the Great Lakes. It is then thought that glacial periodicity came to be governed primarily by the 100,000-year orbital-eccentricity cycle, although the 23,000- and 19,000-year precessional cycles also came into play—the climatic effect of the latter being stronger at lower latitudes. (For an explanation of these and related matters, see Pleistocene Epoch: Cause of the climatic changes and glaciations.)

At the time of the last glacial maximum (about 18,000 years ago), ice sheets had spread from centres located (in descending order of size) southeast and northwest of Hudson Bay, Greenland, the Canadian Cordillera, Baffin Island, and Newfoundland. The last glacial recession took place from about 13,000 to 6,000 years ago but was interrupted by a sharp advance between about 11,000 and 10,000 years ago (called the Younger Dryas event) that was most evident around the North Atlantic. The advance coincided with an apparent temporary diversion of glacial meltwater from the Mississippi River to the St. Lawrence drainage system. It has been postulated that this discharge of cold fresh water disrupted the Atlantic Ocean circulation system that warms the North Atlantic. A more recent cooling episode, the so-called Little Ice Age between about 1450 and 1850, has had no satisfactory explanation. The repeated glaciations scoured the Canadian Shield and deposited glacial debris in the continental interior to the south. In modern times this glacial drift has aided farming in the southern portion of North America; what the north lacks in soil, however, it makes up for in fresh water.