Mountain Drama 101
This is the old, stable interior part of a continent
What is the craton?
This fault type is all about side-to-side movement, not up and down movement
What is a strike-slip fault?
In this large fold structure, the oldest rocks are found in the center, kind of like an anticline in map-view form
What is a dome?
This Wyoming national park looks calm and scenic, but its steep mountain front is basically showing off a giant fault plane
What is Grand Teton National Park?
This California national park is part of the Basin and Range Province and contains the lowest point in the United States
What is Death Valley National Park?
This second stage is when the real mountain drama beings: rocks get folded, faulted, squeezed and pushed around
What is the orogenic stage?
This type of fault forms when tension pulls rocks apart and the hanging wall drops down.
What is a normal fault?
The fold is basically a ned or buckle in rock layers with only one main limb
What is a monocline?
This coastal California national park has the tallest trees in the world and a geologic backstory involving accretionary terrane
What is Redwood National Park?
This type of force pulls the crust apart and helps create Basin and Range landscapes
What is a normal fault?
This first stage of mountain building is when thick layers of sedimentary and/or volcanic rocks pile up over time.
What is the accumulation stage?
This is the actual surface where movement happens along a fault, basically the slide zone
What is the hanging wall?
These forces squeezed rocks together and are usually responsible for creating anticlines and synclines
What are compressional forces?
This mountain in Sequoia National Park is the highest mountain in the lower 48 states
What is Mount Whitney?
In the Basin and Range, the flat valleys are often filled with this loose material eroded from nearby mountains
What is sediment?
After the main mountain building stage, the crust stretches breaks into blocks, uplifts and erosion starts shaping the scenery
What is crustal extension, block faulting, and uplift?
This block of rock sits below the fault plane, the one your feet would be on if you were walking through an old mine shaft
What is the footwall?
This type of rock deformation happens when rocks bend instead of breaking
What is folding?
This river runs through Grand Teton National Park, adding beauty to all that fault-block mountain drama
What is the Snake River?
This fan-shaped pile of sediment forms at the base of mountains when streams slow down and drop their load
What is an alluvial fan?
Thus process helps continents grow when crustal pieces or exotic terranes get added along active plate margins or during collisions
What is tectonic accretion?
In Grand Teton National Park, this flat valley is the top of block that dropped down at least 30,000 feet
What is the hanging wall?
These two large-scale fold structures make circular or oval patterns on geologic maps
What are domes and basins?
These ancient trees, found in places like Great Basin, are considered the oldest trees in the world
What are bristlecone pine trees?
These features expose older metamorphic rocks in some Basin and Range mountains after stretching, uplift, and erosion reveal in deep crust
What are metamorphic core complexes?