How Denver Became the Mile-High City : DNews — news.discovery.com

Denver’s mile-high elevation has long been a big part of the city’s identity. That’s evidenced by how at Coors Field, where the National League’s Colorado Rockies play baseball, a single row of purple seats is marked to denote the spot where the terrain is precisely 5,280 feet in altitude. For a long time, though, geologists have been trying to figure out why the High Plains, where Denver is located, turned out to be so high, yet also level and smooth enough that a city could be built there. But now, in a just-published article in the journal Geology, University of Colorado-Boulder geologists Craig Jones and Kevin Mahan and colleagues offer a new theory. They think that chemical reactions triggered by a flow of deep water could have caused a portion of the North American tectonic plate to become less dense, and in turn rise far above sea level.

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