"This comprehensive field guide takes you on a six-day, west-to-east geologic journey across the Mesozoic magmatic arc of the central Sierra Nevada in California. It summarizes field, structural, geochemistry, and geochronology data collected on individual intrusions, basement terranes intruded by these intrusions, Mesozoic volcanic-sedimentary sections, and from several Sierra Nevada-wide datasets"--Provided by publisher.
Wright (geology, U. of Georgia) and Shervais (geology, Utah State U.) edit selections from a symposium titled "Ophiolites, Batholiths, and Regional Geology: A Session in Honor of Cliff Hopson" held at the Cordilleran Section Meeting of The Geological Society of America in 2005. With contributions from geologists and earth scientists from throughout the United States, the title contains separate sections for papers on the topics of ophiolites, arcs, and batholiths. The publication is illustrated in both black-and-white and color, but contains no index.
At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.
viii debate of those earlier days has been beautifully summarized by H. H. Read in his famous "Granite Controversy" (1957). Read's formulation of the controversy occurred at the time when geochemistry was as a new and powerful tool. The new techniques opened era during which emerging an granites were considered mainly from this new viewpoint. Geochemical signatures have shown that mantle and crustal origins for granites were both possible, but the debate on how and why granites are emplaced did not progress much. Meanwhile, structural geology was essentially geometrical and mechanistic. In the early 70's, the structural approach began to widen to include solid state physics and fluid dynamics. Detailed structural maps of granitic bodies were again published, mainly in France, and analysed in terms of magmatic and plastic flow. The senior editor of this volume and his students deserve much of the credit for this new development. Via microstructural and petrofabric studies, they were able to discriminate between strain in the presence of residual melt or in the solid-state, and, by systematically measuring magnetic fabrics (AMS), they have been able to map magmatic foliations and lineations in ever finer detail, using the internal markers within granites coming from different tectonic environments. The traditional debate has been shifted anew. The burning question now seems to be how the necessary, large-scale or local, crustal extension required for granite emplacement can be obtained.
"This book includes petrology, geochronology, and regional aspects of individual plutons, as well as evolution of the Peninsular Ranges batholith. Several chapters deal with geophysical, chemical, and isotopic based interpretations of the genesis and evolution of the batholith. An accompanying DVD contains detailed colored maps and chemical, isotopic, mineralogic, and physical properties data"--Provided by publisher.
