Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Pikes Peak granite is a 1.08 billion year old Late-Precambrian geologic formation found in the central part of the Front Range of Colorado.It is a coarse-grained pink to light red syenogranite with minor gray monzogranite, and it has a distinctive brick-red appearance where it outcrops.
For example, amazonite can be found next to Barr Trail, the main hiking route to the summit of Pikes Peak. The most famous collecting area on the Peak is Glenn Cove, a glacial cirque located at 11,000 feet (3,400 m) on the north side of the mountain. Quartz crystals, amazonite and topaz crystals can be found in pockets on steep cliffs in this area.
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.
The granitoid rocks are mainly potassic granite and were derived principally from reworked older (3.1–2.8 Ga) gneiss. [3] During the Paleoproterozoic, island-arc terrane associated with the Colorado orogeny accreted to the Wyoming Craton along the Cheyenne belt, a 500-km-wide belt of Proterozoic rocks named for Cheyenne, Wyoming.
The basin was most likely further deepened in Paleogene time, between 66 and 45 million years ago, during the Laramide orogeny that created the modern Colorado Rockies. In particular, the uplifting of the Rockies in the Front Range caused the crust near Denver to buckle downward on the eastern side, deepening the basin.
The Flatirons are rock formations in the western United States, near Boulder, Colorado, consisting of flatirons.There are five large, numbered Flatirons ranging from north to south (First through Fifth, respectively) along the east slope of Green Mountain (elev. 8,148 ft or 2,484 m), and the term "The Flatirons" sometimes refers to these five alone.
Fountain Formation unconformably overlying Precambrian rocks at the parking lot of Red Rocks Park. The Fountain Formation is found along the Front Range of Colorado. To the north, the Formation unconformably overlies Precambrian granite and gneiss. To the south, it overlies Mississippian, Ordovician and Devonian Limestones, as well as Cambrian ...
The mostly flat-lying sedimentary rock units that make up these plateaus are found in component plateaus that are between 4,900 to 11,000 feet (1,500 to 3,350 m) above sea level. A supersequence of these rocks is exposed in the various cliffs and canyons (including the Grand Canyon) that make up the Grand Staircase. Increasingly younger east ...