Grand Tenon & Rocky Mountains
What is the Teton Range?
Mountains that formed when two large crustal block separated along a 40 mile long normal fault.
Which mountain range is located in Shenandoah?
The Blue Ridge Mountains.
What is special about Sequoia tree?
They are the largest tree in the world and are fire resistant.
How did Badwater Basin get its name?
The groundwater emerges as a spring but is lined with salt deposits, making the water taste "bad".
What is the orogenic stage?
The stage of mountain building that occurs after sediment accumulation, involving active uplift and deformation.
What is the Laramide Orogeny?
The uplift event in the Cenozoic created the modern Rocky Mountains, including the Tetons.
In Shenandoah, what rock are the valley made of?
Soft rock such as limestone and shale.
Which mountain is the highest point in the lower 48 states?
Mt. Whitney
Where is the lowest point in North America located?
Badwater Basin.
What are synclines and anticlines?
Two types of folds, that usually occur next to each other because of compressional forces.
What is Jackson Lake?
A glacially carved lake, that was enlarged in 1911 from a dam and is the largest lake in Grand Teton National Park.
What rock is exposed in Cades Cove?
Paleozoic limestone
How tall and old do the redwood trees get on average?
They can be up to 379 ft tall and live up to 2000 years.
In Joshua Tree National Park, what shaped the Cenozoic Granite into "islands of rock", aka inselberg?
There was exfoliation of the granite and a lot of spherical weathering due to high rates of chemical weathering when the climate used to be more humid.
What is a normal fault?
A type of fault that occur when tensional forces pull rocks apart and then hanging wall moves downward.
What is the bedrock located in Grand Teton?
Precambrian crystalline rock, including gneiss with igneous intrusions, but was eroded by the end of the Paleozoic.
In the Great Smokeys, what kind of rock does Laurel Waterfall run over?
Precambrian metasedimentary rock.
What is the most prominent rock in Sequoia and Kings Canyon?
Mesozoic batholith granite
When were the alluvial fan and evaporites deposited in Death Valley?
The Cenozoic Era
What is a craton?
Refers to the old interior of a continent, that is stable and made of mostly crystalline rocks.
What occurred during the Cenozoic era?
Laramide orogeny, crust extension, block faulting, and some volcanism
The highest mountains in the Apps are located where and why?
They are in the Blue Ridge Physiographic Province because rocks have been thrust faulted over soft sedimentary rocks and the crystalline rock in the province is resitant to weathering.
What happened to the land because of the subduction of oceanic crust?
The land is accretionary, and there is not a mix of sedimentary rocks and mafic lave at the top of the oceanic crust (aka Mélange).
Death Valley mountains have what kind of core complex and what does it mean?
They have a metamorphic core complex, meaning crystalline rocks, usually precambrian, were thrust faulted far from their original location.
What is a strike-slip fault?