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This is a list of drainage basins in the U.S. State of Colorado. Colorado encompasses the headwaters of several important rivers. The state is divided into two major hydrographic regions by the Continental Divide of the Americas .
The Raton Basin is a geologic structural basin in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. It takes its name from Raton Pass and the town of Raton, New Mexico. In extent, the basin is approximately 50 miles (80 km) east-west, and 90 miles (140 km) north-south, in Huerfano and Las Animas Counties, Colorado, and Colfax County, New Mexico.
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 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.
Jefferson County, Colorado, U.S. [4] Parent range: Front Range foothills [3] Topo map(s) USGS 7.5' topographic map Golden, Colorado [1] Geology; Mountain type: Mesa: Climbing; First ascent: 1840s by Black Kettle and tribe: Easiest route: Quarry road up west slope
The geology of the Rocky Mountains is that of a discontinuous series of mountain ranges with distinct geological origins. Collectively these make up the Rocky Mountains , a mountain system that stretches from Northern British Columbia through central New Mexico and which is part of the great mountain system known as the North American Cordillera .
The USGS convention has been to use Colorado Group where the rocks are further divided into formations, Colorado Formation where no beds are developed enough to be mapped as formations, and Colorado Shale where the unit is composed of little more than shale with no distinctive structures (such as in north-central Montana).
All the major mountain ranges in the state of Colorado, United States, are considered subranges of the Southern Rocky Mountains. As given in the table, topographic elevation is the vertical distance above the reference geoid , a mathematical model of the Earth's sea level as an equipotential gravitational surface.