New Mexico Aulacogen
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New Mexico Aulacogen
The New Mexico Aulacogen is a failed rift, or failed rift arm (aulacogen), that may have formed during the Cambrian and Ordovician Periods in the area from central Colorado through southern New Mexico. Its presence is inferred from pervasive alkaline and carbonatite intrusions of this age in this area. These include the Iron Hill carbonatite complex of central Colorado. A smaller alkali-carbonatite complex at Lobo Hill (New Mexico), Lobo Hill returns an Ar-Ar age of 518 ± 5.7 million years. The Florida Mountains uplift took place at about this same time and may be associated with this aulacogen. Among the dikes associated with the postulated aulacogen are episyenite dikes in southern New Mexico believed to have formed from circulation of alkali-rich fluids through the host rock. Clasts of episyenite are found in the Bliss Formation, suggesting the dikes formed prior to late Cambrian. Some of the dikes contain heavy rare-earth elements in sufficient concentrations to be potentiall ...
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Cambrian Period
The Cambrian Period ( ; sometimes symbolized C with bar, Ꞓ) was the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era, and of the Phanerozoic Eon. The Cambrian lasted 53.4 million years from the end of the preceding Ediacaran Period 538.8 million years ago (mya) to the beginning of the Ordovician Period mya. Its subdivisions, and its base, are somewhat in flux. The period was established as "Cambrian series" by Adam Sedgwick, who named it after Cambria, the Latin name for 'Cymru' (Wales), where Britain's Cambrian rocks are best exposed. Sedgwick identified the layer as part of his task, along with Roderick Murchison, to subdivide the large "Transition Series", although the two geologists disagreed for a while on the appropriate categorization. The Cambrian is unique in its unusually high proportion of sedimentary deposits, sites of exceptional preservation where "soft" parts of organisms are preserved as well as their more resistant shells. As a result, our understanding of the Ca ...
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Iron Hill Carbonatite Complex
Iron () is a chemical element with symbol Fe (from la, ferrum) and atomic number 26. It is a metal that belongs to the first transition series and group 8 of the periodic table. It is, by mass, the most common element on Earth, right in front of oxygen (32.1% and 30.1%, respectively), forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust. In its metallic state, iron is rare in the Earth's crust, limited mainly to deposition by meteorites. Iron ores, by contrast, are among the most abundant in the Earth's crust, although extracting usable metal from them requires kilns or furnaces capable of reaching or higher, about higher than that required to smelt copper. Humans started to master that process in Eurasia during the 2nd millennium BCE and the use of iron tools and weapons began to displace copper alloys, in some regions, only around 1200 BCE. That event is considered the transition from the Bronze Age to t ...
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Paleozoic New Mexico
The Paleozoic (or Palaeozoic) Era is the earliest of three geologic eras of the Phanerozoic Eon. The name ''Paleozoic'' ( ;) was coined by the British geologist Adam Sedgwick in 1838 by combining the Greek words ''palaiós'' (, "old") and ''zōḗ'' (), "life", meaning "ancient life" ). It is the longest of the Phanerozoic eras, lasting from , and is subdivided into six geologic periods (from oldest to youngest): # Cambrian # Ordovician # Silurian # Devonian # Carboniferous # Permian The Paleozoic comes after the Neoproterozoic Era of the Proterozoic Eon and is followed by the Mesozoic Era. The Paleozoic was a time of dramatic geological, climatic, and evolutionary change. The Cambrian witnessed the most rapid and widespread diversification of life in Earth's history, known as the Cambrian explosion, in which most modern phyla first appeared. Arthropods, molluscs, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and synapsids all evolved during the Paleozoic. Life began in the ocean b ...
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Zuni Mountains
Zuni may refer to: Peoples and languages * Zuni people, an indigenous people of the United States * Zuni language, their language Places * Zuni, Virginia, an unincorporated town in Virginia in the United States * Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, a census-designated place in New Mexico, United States * Zuni Salt Lake, in New Mexico, United States * Zuni River, in New Mexico and Arizona, United States * Zuni Café, a restaurant in San Francisco, United States Other uses * Zuni (rocket), an American missile * USS ''Zuni'' (ATF-95), an American warship * Applebay Zuni, a glider * Zuni (website), a Vietnamese e-learning website See also * Zuni ethnobotany * Zuni mythology * Zuni music Pueblo music includes the music of the Hopi, Zuni, Taos Pueblo, San Ildefonso, Santo Domingo, and many other Puebloan peoples, and according to Bruno Nettl features one of the most complex Native American musical styles on the continent. Characte ... * Zune * '' Zooni'', a Hindi-language f ...
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Rare-earth Element
The rare-earth elements (REE), also called the rare-earth metals or (in context) rare-earth oxides or sometimes the lanthanides (yttrium and scandium are usually included as rare earths), are a set of 17 nearly-indistinguishable lustrous silvery-white soft heavy metals. Compounds containing rare earths have diverse applications in electrical and electronic components, lasers, glass, magnetic materials, and industrial processes. Scandium and yttrium are considered rare-earth elements because they tend to occur in the same ore deposits as the lanthanides and exhibit similar chemical properties, but have different electronic and magnetic properties. These metals tarnish slowly in air at room temperature and react slowly with cold water to form hydroxides, liberating hydrogen. They react with steam to form oxides, and at elevated temperature (400°C) ignite spontaneously. These elements and their compounds have no biological function other than in several specialized enzymes, s ...
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Bliss Formation
The Bliss Formation is a geologic formation that is exposed in southern New Mexico, west Texas, and southeastern Arizona. It preserves fossils dating back to the late Cambrian to early Ordovician periods. Description The formation consists of ledge-forming brown to maroon medium- to coarse-grained sandstone; thinner beds of very fine-grained glauconitic sandstone; and fine-grained sandstone interbedded with limestone or dolomite. A conglomerate bed is often present at the base and there are rare beds of oolitic ironstone. The formation lies unconformably on Precambrian basement rock except in the Florida Mountains, where it overlies Cambrian syenite and granite. The formation fills paleovalleys in the basement rock, and in some locations (such as the central Franklin Mountains and the west-central Florida Mountains) it is absent. It grades into the overlying El Paso Formation, with the contact placed either at the top of uppermost red or brown sandstone bed of t ...
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Episyenite
Syenite is a coarse-grained intrusive igneous rock with a general composition similar to that of granite, but deficient in quartz, which, if present at all, occurs in relatively small concentrations (< 5%). Some syenites contain larger proportions of mafic components and smaller amounts of material than most granites; those are classed as being of intermediate composition. The extrusive equivalent of syenite is trachyte.


Composition of syenites

The
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Florida Mountains
The Florida Mountains are a small long, mountain range in New Mexico. The mountains lie in southern Luna County about southeast of Deming, and north of the state of Chihuahua, Mexico; the range lies in the north of the Chihuahuan Desert region, and extreme southwestern New Mexico. The Florida Mountains are east and adjacent to New Mexico State Road 11, the north–south route to Chihuahua; it becomes Highway 23 in Chihuahua and connects to Mexican Federal Highway 2, the major east–west route of the north Chihuahuan Desert adjacent the U.S.-Mexico border. Description The Florida Mountains are a small, compact range about long, with various peaks from . The range highpoint is Florida Peak, , which lies near the north. Other high peaks in the center-south, are Gym, Baldy, and South Peak. Four other peaks are in the extreme northwest; besides Florida Peak, the tallest of the other four is Capitol Dome, at . Most of the land surrounding the prominent rise of the mountain ran ...
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Lobo Hill (New Mexico)
Lobo, also known as El Lobo, Cabezo del Lobo, Cerro del Lobo and Mojón del Lobo, is a 630 m high mountain in the Campo de Belchite comarca, Zaragoza Province, Aragon, Spain, located about 3 km (1.86 miles) to the south of Belchite and 2 km (1.24 miles) east of Almonacid de la Cuba. This hill is named after the wolf ( es, lobo), for there were wolves in the area until the 19th century. Lobo Hill is arid and desolate-looking. It is barely covered with low and sparse clumps of dryland vegetation. There is a triangulation station at the top marked "LOBO" in large letters. History There was much military activity in and around this arid mountain both in 1809 during the Peninsular War and again in 1937–1938 at the height of the Spanish Civil War, during the Battle of Belchite (1937). The top of the hill commands an excellent view of the Campo de Belchite. The holes and tunnels from where the Spanish Republican The Spanish Republic (), commonly known as the Second Sp ...
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Carbonatite
Carbonatite () is a type of intrusive rock, intrusive or extrusive rock, extrusive igneous rock defined by mineralogic composition consisting of greater than 50% carbonate minerals. Carbonatites may be confused with marble and may require geochemical verification. Carbonatites usually occur as small volcanic plug, plugs within zoned alkalic intrusive complexes, or as dike (geology), dikes, sill (geology), sills, breccias, and vein (geology), veins. They are almost exclusively associated with continental rift-related tectonic settings. It seems that there has been a steady increase in the carbonatitic igneous activity through the Earth's history, from the Archean Eon (geology), eon to the present. Nearly all carbonatite occurrences are intrusives or subvolcanic rock, subvolcanic intrusives. This is because carbonatite lava flows, being composed largely of soluble carbonates, are easily weathered and are therefore unlikely to be preserved in the geologic record. Carbonatite erupti ...
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Ordovician Period
The Ordovician ( ) is a geologic period and system, the second of six periods of the Paleozoic Era. The Ordovician spans 41.6 million years from the end of the Cambrian Period million years ago (Mya) to the start of the Silurian Period Mya. The Ordovician, named after the Welsh tribe of the Ordovices, was defined by Charles Lapworth in 1879 to resolve a dispute between followers of Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison, who were placing the same rock beds in North Wales in the Cambrian and Silurian systems, respectively. Lapworth recognized that the fossil fauna in the disputed strata were different from those of either the Cambrian or the Silurian systems, and placed them in a system of their own. The Ordovician received international approval in 1960 (forty years after Lapworth's death), when it was adopted as an official period of the Paleozoic Era by the International Geological Congress. Life continued to flourish during the Ordovician as it did in the earlier Cambrian P ...
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Alkaline
In chemistry, an alkali (; from ar, القلوي, al-qaly, lit=ashes of the saltwort) is a base (chemistry), basic, ionic compound, ionic salt (chemistry), salt of an alkali metal or an alkaline earth metal. An alkali can also be defined as a base that dissolves in water. A solution of a soluble base has a pH greater than 7.0. The adjective alkaline, and less often, alkalescent, is commonly used in English language, English as a synonym for basic, especially for bases soluble in water. This broad use of the term is likely to have come about because alkalis were the first bases known to obey the acid-base reaction theories#Arrhenius theory, Arrhenius definition of a base, and they are still among the most common bases. Etymology The word "alkali" is derived from Arabic ''al qalīy'' (or ''alkali''), meaning ''the calcined ashes'' (see calcination), referring to the original source of alkaline substances. A water-extract of burned plant ashes, called potash and composed mostly ...
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