gemland.net

  Weirdly-shaped rocks. I’ve heard that phrase over and over again, mostly from tourists. Wondering why the rocks look like they do, those visiting the Valley of the Sun notice them immediately, as those formations are almost right next to the airport where the visitors have just arrived.

  The pinnacles stuck in my mind, too, on my first visit to Phoenix, many years ago. Brightly orange in the setting sunlight, there was something about their curvy, pointed look, all filled with voids and cavities: they seemed like frozen flames rising from the flat desert floor.

  The Papago Buttes, we call them. They are the centerpiece of Papago Park, one of the City’s thoughtfully planned expanses of preservation in what otherwise surely would be yet more endlessly repetitive housing tracts, strip malls, and asphalt checkerboard development.

  What people first notice about the buttes are the caves and the holes in the rock. In geology-speak, those are called “tifoni”. I looked up that word, and it means “typhoons” in Italian. I’m not sure why or how those storms made it into the lexicon of geology, let alone in Italian, but maybe that’s a subject for another day.

  As for the openings themselves, they are caused by differential weathering and breaking-down of the host sandstone and conglomerate (which is a rock composed of different-sized stones and particles, sometimes called “puddingstone”).

  But there is more here of which to speak. The structure of the buttes, or the way in which they connect to the rocks underneath, is one of the more interesting facets of the geology here.

  In other writings, I’ve previously described to you the nature of the rock surface underlying our valley — an amazingly deep, rugged trench in the Earth’s crust. The buttes are just the tips of some craggy peaks that are almost completely buried by the sand, gravel, and salt beds that fill the valley and give its floor such a flat appearance. They poke through the surface in Papago Park just enough to make a great backdrop for the Phoenix Zoo, and the Desert Botanical Garden.

  Drive along Galvin Parkway near the Zoo, or better yet, take a walk around the Hole-in-the-Rock area in Papago Park and look over at the prominent tall butte, just to the northwest. You will notice there, I hope, that the reddish sandstone and conglomerate is layered, and that the layers are slanted steeply to the southwest.

  Recall also, that I told you about the South Mountain Metamorphic Core Complex (I just love that phrase — it’s got such an academically-sounding, yet melodic, ring to it.) in my previous essay, “Name That Tune”.

  I explained there how the broad, arching dome of South Mountain was pushed up from the heated, plastic rock of our planet’s crust around 25 million years ago. Though the rock was hot and soft down deep, it had to push through higher layers that were cool and rigid. Some of those layers are the orange rocks that make up the Papago Buttes.

  Rigid rocks don’t bend, of course. They break. And when they broke, in this case, they had to “get out of the way” of the emerging dome, part of which we see now as South Mountain. In making way for that uprising mass, they couldn’t just simply slide out sideways, as they were confined by other rocks in the same layer, and rocks behind, above, and below those.

  You might be thinking that South Mountain is quite a distance from Papago Park, so why the problem? Geologically, of course, it is not. And at depth, down there below the fill material in the valley, their rocks are physically connected. When the rock layers broke from the pressure below, they could only break up into fragmentary pieces or slabs, looking something like how a deck of playing cards looks when it is unevenly pushed from the side, splaying the cards into a skewed stack.

  Now imagine those cards as the rock slabs, first breaking into pieces, then standing up, while tilting back and away from the imposing mass coming up from below. That’s what you see at the Papago Buttes, and in my accompanying picture. The tilt can even be seen at Tempe Butte, next to Sun Devil Stadium, even though that is a different type of rock. All of the rock layers are tilting away from South Mountain.

  Theoretically, other rock layers hidden beneath us also tilt away from South Mountain, making it the center of a giant bullseye, of sorts. Those inclined layers strangely reveal one more chapter of the ongoing story written in the rocks all around us.

 Author’s note: To learn more about “weirdly-shaped rocks” and the rest of the Phoenix area’s engaging geology, visit www.gemland.com.

*********

  You can print this GeoStory ™ out as a PDF document for FREE (for NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY).

  Dominating the skyline east of Phoenix and Scottsdale, Four Peaks is one of the most recognizable of central Arizona’s mountains. Locals consider it to be one mountain, so I won’t say “Four Peaks are …”. It’s one of Arizona’s landmarks for which little pondering is required as to how it got it’s name! (In the photo above, Four Peaks is in the distance behind the closer Goldfield Mountains.)

  Geologically, it is a piece of landscape art, and the way it formed is almost counterintuitive. You might think that the four summits we see so easily are big piles of rock that were molded into shape on top of the older, lower slopes. But that would be wrong! The rocks of those four summits were there first. Then the granite below was added.

  How, you might ask, could that be? Well, the makeup of the Earth’s crust is a complicated thing, and is not always what it seems. Geologic time, and the forces that have moved things around throughout the history of the world, always seem to combine to give us an interesting story.

  If you drive out the Beeline Highway (SR87), by the time you are about 15 miles from Fountain Hills you will be near Milepost 200, and you will be looking at Four Peaks on your right (east). Even better, go to near Milepost 204 and turn onto the gravel road marked “Four Peaks”, and you can get a few miles closer. You’ll be able to see that the mountain is basically made of two rock formations. One is a continuation of the bedrock you may be standing on: granite. The other forms all four of the peaks. The dividing line between these rocks is more or less where the slope breaks, just below the notches between the peaks.

  About 1700 million years ago, during what we now call Precambrian time, our area lay on the edge of an old continent — an area probably much like today’s Gulf Coast near New Orleans. All of the sand and muck that came down the big rivers from the interior got dumped into a big basin, like the present-day Gulf of Mexico. There it piled up, got buried, eventually hardened, and was baked into thick, resistant layer or slab — very hard rock we call quartzite.

  Several hundred million years later (not really a long time in geologic terms) the immense forces that constantly reshape the Earth’s surface crumpled the land and its many rock formations from side to side, pushing up great mountain ranges that actually extended all the way over to where today’s Great Lakes are. Geologists give this little event a nicely sensual name — the Mazatzal Orogeny.

  During all of that pushing and shoving a lot of the rock below was very hot. Molten granite, in fact, and here’s where the art work comes in. For whatever reason, in the area of the future Verde River Valley, the underside of the above-mentioned quartzite slab was very unevenly shaped. Maybe it started out that way; maybe it got shaped by the pushing action of the molten rock, pulsing up from below. The result, in any case, was that monstrous chunks of the quartzite now hung down into the granite. Four of them.

  Granite erodes away more easily than quartzite. It breaks down into crumbly rock grains, some of which those of us who hate mowing lawns use for landscaping around Phoenix. So the granite around the four big masses of rock slowly wore away, down, down, into rolling hills and slopes and surrealistically shaped boulders that make the Beeline such a scenic drive.

  The four big peaks towering above the trip to Payson even have a geologically technical name: roof pendants — remnants of a much more vast layer of quartzite; a layer of one-time mud and beach sands and sea-side days gone by.

  These big pendants give rise to little pendants — sparkling, beautiful little pendants in the form of the vivid purple gemstones we call Amethyst, mounted into jewelry (yes, not only pendants, but ring stones, earrings, and all other wearable forms).

  You see, up there on southernmost of those peaks, is one of Arizona’s (and America’s) treasures: the Four Peaks Amethyst Mine. Deep inside the quartzite, and way in the past, networks of fractures formed where quartz-rich solutions grew beautiful quartz crystals.

  Quartz is a mineral composed of silicon and oxygen, and the purple variety is called Amethyst. The crystals are now mined and cut into gems, which in this case are considered to be within the world’s finest grade of amethyst.

  You can even wear one — a little pendant cut from a very big one!

 Author’s note: Besides being very inaccessible, the Four Peaks Amethyst Mine is on private property and is completely closed to the public.

*********

  You can print this GeoStory ™ out as a PDF document for FREE (for NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY).

  I moved to Phoenix about thirteen years ago, and as I drove around a bit back then and started learning my way around town, I took note of the various landforms surrounding us. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, but South Mountain looked distinct to me — different from and more rounded than the other mountains that stick out of the relentless grid of asphalt and concrete that stretches on and on through the Valley of the Sun.

  I started looking into the reason, and one of the things I soon found out is that the rugged barrier at the south end of Central Avenue is correctly called the South Mountains (note the “s”). Where all the TV towers stand, and what most people refer to as “South Mountain”, is more properly named the Main Ridge. Looking south from the downtown area of Phoenix, you can also see a separate, smaller high point on the west end (right) of that rise. Its correct name is the Alta Ridge. Much lower, in front of it, and just next to the small town of Laveen, is the North Ridge.

  Speaking of names, the Pima Indian (Akimel O’odham) name for this set of peaks is “Muhadag Du’ag”, or “Greasy Mountain” — a take-off on the dark sheen of the rocks there, caused by a surface coloration known as “desert varnish”. If we really wanted to honor Native Americans, especially those who actually lived in the Valley, we would return its name to what they called it. We could have applied this line of thinking to certain other mountains around Phoenix as well, but I’ll save that discussion for another time.

  More often than not, like everyone else in town, I also call this aggregate of lumps South Mountain. The big point here is the way it looks -a long, low dome-shaped rampart. There is one simple reason for that: the rocks of South Mountain were pushed up, basically through the crust of the Earth. Most of the other ranges around us traverse central Arizona for the opposite reason: the landscape is being pulled apart on a massive scale. They are left standing as evidence of that strain as the valleys between them, like our own, drop away slowly, surely over time. Gravity never sleeps.

  South Mountain is what is called in geology-speak a Metamorphic Core Complex, and I’ll spare you some of the technical details. That term, which from now on in this article I’ll refer to as “MCC”, is a great name to throw around at cocktail parties, and one to remember if you are ever to be on one of those TV “Question & Answer” shows with big prize money. There is a whole, albeit small, subset of humanity out there that seems to be fascinated by them, and they’re not just geologists.

  Don’t ask me why, but one time, on a whim, I typed the term into a music-sharing website, and was amazed that a song actually came up with that name. Somebody (artist unknown) had in fact named a song to honor one! I downloaded it immediately, of course, certain the musician would not have minded. It is a spacey-sounding instrumental (naturally, and gladly) — I am not sure what kind of lyrics you could put to the subject of plate tectonics.

  There is “belt” of MCC’s across western North America, running from British Columbia down into Mexico. They run right through central Arizona, and South Mountain is one of the best of them. They are thought to represent an early phase of the “pulling apart” of North America. Around 25 million years ago, the crust started to stretch in a northeast to southwest direction. As it did so, it thinned out, and lighter rocks, which were once more deeply situated, basically “bobbed up” (the pushing-up I mentioned above) as sort of dome-shaped wrinkles — the South Mountains are one such dome.

  Then, millions of years later, the crust actually started to fracture and break apart. As you might expect, the resulting cracks — called faults — run perpendicular to the orientation of the stretching. This force, then, gave us the big valleys we inhabit, and left in-between massive blocks of rock standing — these are the mountains (Camelback Mountain and Squaw / Piestewa Peak, for example) around that have weathered into jagged summits with a character unlike that of South Mountain.

  I am continually perplexed by the number of Phoenicians who have told me they’ve never been up onto the South Mountains! There is no better view of the Valley than what you can get from Dobbins Lookout (the most popular spot). When you go that viewpoint, look just to the east, at the canyon wall just below you. There you will see the rocks all stretched out, horizontally, with very gentle curves from side to side — visible testimony of the doming forces that created the South Mountains MCC (see photo). Once you see that evidence, you will notice the same rock fabric everywhere around in those peaks.

  For more on MCC’s, go to my website, and look at a string of six photos beginning with a view of Central Phoenix from South Mountain. The fifth view in the sequence is a view from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, looking directly down onto the subject of someone’s favorite song.

*********

  You can print this GeoStory ™ out as a PDF document for FREE (for NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY).

  Geology, for the most part, is a s–l–o–w process.

  A grain of sand moves here, a rivulet develops there. Case in point? I have been walking up and down the same picturesque pile of granite boulders in Carefree, Arizona, for 12 years now, and they still look just the same as they did when I first started those hikes.

  But every so often, something wild happens on the Earth, and the terrain changes very quickly and markedly. As with an earthquake, for example. Or with a volcanic eruption for another. Then people’s heads raise, and they take note. If it only was all so exciting.

  In our part of the world, both kinds of geologic events have taken place – many times – but it is the volcanoes that have shaped the landscape in the most sensational fashion, and given us so many “Arizona Highways” type memorable scenes and photographs.

  One volcano, in particular, stands out above all the others, literally. We know it as the San Francisco Peaks (yes, plural, to most), but it is really one volcano that has erupted a number of times. It forms the dramatic backdrop to Flagstaff, gives Arizonans a place to go skiing in the winter, and can be seen from most all of the northern part of our state. For the Indians, it is a sacred mountain, and a legendary landmark. At 12,633 feet in elevation, it is the highest point in Arizona.

  Humphreys Peak, Agassiz Peak, and Fremont Peak are the names of the major summits in the San Francisco Peaks, but they should all be lumped together and called San Francisco Mountain, for it is one thing geologically – a stratovolcano.

  It should have a nice conical shape, like Mt. Fuji in Japan, or Vesuvius in Italy. Mt. St. Helens in Washington State also once had such a symmetrically pleasing profile. But then, it blew its top. And now, when viewed from above, it looks “U” shaped and crater-like.

  The eruptions that formed San Francisco Mountain began around 1.8 million years ago. That is very recent, relatively speaking. It is after the Grand Canyon was mostly formed, and about the time the latest round of ice-ages was beginning. From the flats of the Colorado Plateau spewed molten rock, in different phases, slowly building towards the sky, sometimes violently, sometimes lazily.

  And that, you see, is why it is called a stratovolcano, or sometimes, a composite volcano. It has layers of different kinds of volcanic rock within it, each layer resulting from a separate eruption.

  Not all molten rock (called magma) is the same. Some is very fluid when it erupts to the world’s surface, and flows readily. It forms broad, dome-shaped mountains like those of the Hawaiian Islands, or the White Mountains of eastern Arizona, and is called basalt.

  Another type of molten rock explodes violently when let loose, and literally blows its confining mountain mass to pieces. That kind is called rhyolite, and such an event in historic time was the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

  There is whole range of other rock types between these two ends of the volcanic spectrum.

  Our own San Francisco Peak blew its top off some 400,000 years ago. The evidence of that is the so-called “Inner Basin”, on the northeast side of the Peak. Humphreys Peak, and the other above-mentioned summits are just the high spots along the rim of the remaining crater of the blowout.

  Before that explosion, the summit of San Francisco Peak was probably 15,000 to 16,000 feet above sea-level. Had it not erupted like it did back then, Flagstaff would have had an even better and more spectacular setting, the mountain would have shown a conical profile even higher than the Northwest’s Mt. Rainier, and the skiing would have really been something else indeed.

  Volcanism in Arizona is not necessarily over, and in fact, I would bet on that.

  The last volcanic eruption in the state took place in 1064 AD, and produced Sunset Crater, a small volcano just to the east of San Francisco Peak, on the east side of Highway 89. This date is known from tree-ring studies in the area, and there is a very good chance that the resident humans of the time witnessed the eruption. Once again, in geologic terms, a thousand years, or even 400, 000 years, is not a long time ago.

  To the north, east, and west of Flagstaff are many other volcanic peaks and lava flows, all indicating that somewhere down below, not too deep, there is still plenty of molten rock waiting to burst forth.

  Fortunately, with modern technology at our disposal, the chances of an unexpected blowout are very small.

*********

  You can print this GeoStory ™ out as a PDF document for FREE (for NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY).