The bedrock of Colorado was assembled from island arcs accreted onto the edge of the ancient Wyoming Craton. The Sonoma orogeny uplifted the ancestral Rocky Mountains in parallel with the diversification of multicellular life. Shallow seas covered the regions, followed by the uplift current Rocky Mountains and intense volcanic activity. Colorado has thick sedimentary sequences with oil, gas and coal deposits, as well as base metals and other minerals. Stratigraphy, tectonics and geologic history In the early Proterozoic, between 1.78 and 1.65 billion years ago, the continental crust of Colorado was assembled from several older island arcs, along the coast of the Archean Wyoming Craton. The Colorado Province took shape as a mobile belt—an area of thinner, orogeny related continental crust lacking the deep "keel" of rock, which stabilized the neighboring Wyoming Craton and other cratons like it. Throughout Colorado's geologic history, rocks have often been deformed, metamorphosed and overprinted, obscuring the ancient record. Beginning 1.7 billion years ago granite and pegmatite intruded. The Routt Plutonic Suite is dated to 1.66 to 1.79 billion years old and is an important rock formation in Rocky Mountain National Park and Buffalo Mountain. The Berthoud orogeny from 1.45 to 1.35 billion years ago created granite intrusions, uplifts, rifts and ductile shear zones, grouped as the Berthoud Plutonic Suite. The Grenville orogeny intruded large granites throughout much of Laurentia, the Proto-North American continent, although Pike's Peak was the only location significantly affected by Grenville granite intrusions in Colorado. The region's crystalline basement rock finished forming with a massive batholith 1.1 billion years ago. The breakup of Rodinia one of the oldest supercontinents, produced rifts between 900 million and 600 million years ago in the Neoproterozoic. These deep extensional basement faults filled with sediments, such as the Uinta rift basin and were often reactivated more recently in Earth history by orogenies. The Uinta Formation and Uncompahgre Formation are both examples of remnant Precambrian rift basin sediments. The end of the Neoproterozoic is not known from the rock record, indicating a period of long-running terrestrial erosion which produced by the Great Unconformity, from 1.1 billion to 510 million years ago. Ten kilometers of basement rock and almost all Precambrian sediments eroded away. Paleozoic (539-251 million years ago) In the Paleozoic, as multicellular life became common, Colorado was covered in a shallow tropical sea. Thick sequences of sandstone, shale and limestone were laid down on the Precambrian