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The Sierra Nevada Batholith is a large batholith that is approximately 400 miles long and 60-80 miles wide which forms the core of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, exposed at the surface as granite.
In early Triassic time, an extensive volcanic arc system called the Sierran Arc began to develop along the western margin of the North American continent. In Southern California, this volcanic arc would develop throughout the Mesozoic Era to become the geologic regions known as the Sierra Nevada Batholith, the Peninsular Ranges Batholith, (in the Peninsular Ranges), and other plutonic and ...
Half Dome, a quartz monzonite monolith in Yosemite National Park and part of the Sierra Nevada Batholith. A batholith (from Ancient Greek bathos 'depth' and lithos 'rock') is a large mass of intrusive igneous rock (also called plutonic rock), larger than 100 km 2 (40 sq mi) in area, [1] that forms from cooled magma deep in the Earth's crust.
The granodiorite forms part of the Tuolumne Intrusive Suite (Tuolumne Batholith), one of the four major intrusive suites within the Sierra Nevada. It has been assigned radiometric ages between 88 and 87 million years and therefore reached its cooling stage in the Coniacian (Upper Cretaceous).
Mokelumne Peak has the largest body of metamorphic rock in the region, called the Mokelumne Peak roof pendant, extending over an area of 15 square miles (39 km 2).These rocks were originally Jurassic or Cretaceous age, but were metamorphosed when plutons of the Sierra Nevada batholith intruded in the Cretaceous.
In 1930 Ernst Cloos received a research grant from the German government to apply the methods of granite tectonics in the Sierra Nevada. [3] [6] [7] [8] This research made him known in the USA. In 1931 he received a teaching position as a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, where he began to work on the geology of the Appalachian Mountains in ...
The block's granitic core, fragments of the batholith of the Peninsular Ranges, shares its origins with the Sierra Nevada mountains far to the east. During the past 30 million years the North American Plate has been overriding the East Pacific Rise and transform faulting along the developing San Andreas fault zone.
Rocks in the ranges are dominated by Mesozoic granitic rocks, derived from the same massive batholith which forms the core of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. They are part of a geologic province known as the Salinian Block which broke off the North American plate as the San Andreas Fault and Gulf of California came into being.