Mountain Building Basics
This is the first stage of major mountain building, when thick sedimentary or volcanic rocks are deposited.
What is the accumulation stage?
This type of fold arches upward and has the oldest rocks in the center.
What is an anticline?
Grand Teton National Park is located in this state.
What is Wyoming?
This national park in Nevada contains Lehman Cave and ancient bristlecone pines.
What is Great Basin National Park?
These two parks are in the Sierra Nevada and contain the largest-diameter trees in the world.
What are Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks?
This stage is the active mountain-building stage and causes folding and faulting.
What is the orogenic stage?
This type of fold bends downward like a trough and has the youngest rocks in the center.
What is a syncline?
This river runs through the valley at Grand Teton National Park.
What is the Snake River?
These fan-shaped sediment deposits form where streams leave steep mountains and reach flat basin floors.
What are alluvial fans?
This mountain in Sequoia National Park is the highest mountain in the lower 48 states.
What is Mount Whitney?
This is the old, stable interior part of a continent.
What is a craton?
These are cracks in rocks with no displacement.
What are joints?
The steep mountain face of the Tetons is related to this type of fault.
What is a normal fault?
This flat dry lake or salt-flat surface forms in internally drained desert basins.
What is a playa?
This coastal California park has the tallest trees in the world and formed on accretionary terrane.
What is Redwood National Park?
This process adds pieces of crust or exotic terranes to a continent during plate collisions.
What is tectonic accretion?
These are cracks in rocks where displacement or movement has occurred.
What are faults?
In Grand Teton, the flat valley is the top of this block, which dropped down and filled with sediment.
What is the hanging wall?
This California park is in the Basin and Range Province and is known for desert scenery and granitic rock formations.
What is Joshua Tree National Park?
At Hot Springs National Park, groundwater is heated mostly by movement along these structures, not by a magma chamber.
What are faults?
This final mountain-building stage includes crustal extension, uplift, erosion, and block faulting.
What is crustal extension, block faulting, and uplift?
These two fault types are dip-slip faults because movement is vertical along the fault plane.
What are normal and reverse faults?
The Tetons rose more than this many feet compared to the valley block.
What is more than 30,000 feet?
This California park contains the lowest point in the United States and has many normal faults and fault scarps.
What is Death Valley National Park?
This flat, fertile valley in Great Smoky Mountains National Park is underlain by limestone and was settled by people.
What is Cades Cove?