A ‘version of a twilight zone’ hides among rare rocks in NC forest. How it got there

A mysterious “version of a Twilight Zone” exists in North Carolina, and the U.S. Forest Service has revealed its location just in time for Halloween.

In Nantahala National Forest, about 150 miles northwest of Charlotte, is a place where the earth essentially has turned itself inside out, resulting in “extreme conditions,” according to an Oct. 16 Facebook post.

“It’s a special area with rocks like peridotite and dunite. These rocks are really rare because they’re usually deep beneath the Earth’s surface. They sit between the bottom of the ocean and the upper mantle. But here, they’ve come up to the surface,” the service reports.

“These rocks create a type of soil that lacks nutrients. Therefore, only plants that can handle extreme conditions are able to thrive.”

The result is a “serpentine barren” where you’ll see two dozen plant and insect species rarely seen in North Carolina, including some found nowhere else in the world.

The best known part of the barrens in North Carolina is Buck Creek Serpentine Barren “between the towns of Franklin and Hayesville.” It covers about “300 acres from 3,400 feet elevation along Buck Creek to over 4,000 feet elevation atop Corundum Knob,” the forest service says.

So how did this netherworld sprout in North Carolina?

“This happened about 400 million years ago when the Blue Ridge Mountains were forming,” the forest service says. “The collision of oceanic crust and continental crust pushed these rocks up.”

Similar islands of rock “occur intermittently in an arc east of the Appalachian Mountains from Alabama to Maine,” and most host similarly rare ecosystems, experts say.

This story was originally published October 18, 2023 at 1:17 PM with the headline "A ‘version of a twilight zone’ hides among rare rocks in NC forest. How it got there."