Geomorphology and structure in the Grants mineral belt
Every fall since 1950, the New Mexico Geological Society (NMGS) has held an annual Fall Field Conference that explores some region of New Mexico (or surrounding states). Always well attended, these conferences provide a guidebook to participants. Besides detailed road logs, the guidebooks contain many well written, edited, and peer-reviewed geoscience papers. These books have set the national standard for geologic guidebooks and are an essential geologic reference for anyone working in or around New Mexico.
Outline of the geology of the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico
Every fall since 1950, the New Mexico Geological Society (NMGS) has held an annual Fall Field Conference that explores some region of New Mexico (or surrounding states). Always well attended, these conferences provide a guidebook to participants. Besides detailed road logs, the guidebooks contain many well written, edited, and peer-reviewed geoscience papers. These books have set the national standard for geologic guidebooks and are an essential geologic reference for anyone working in or around New Mexico.
An Exhumed Erosion Surface in the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico
The plateau-like surface of San Pedro Mountain in the northwestern part of the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico is a remnant of an exhumed erosion surface. It is overlain in places by a thin veneer of chert, here named the Pedernal chert, with underlying gravel. The chert and gravel are a part of a thin wedge of Tertiary beds which thickens eastward and extends across the northern spurs of the Jemez Mountains. The rocks of the wedge are correlative with the El Rito formation, Abiquiu tuff, and Santa Fe formation, found in the Rio Grande depression east of the border faults of that trough. The stratigraphy and structure of the Tertiary sedimentary rocks of the wedge reveal in some detail the history of the deformation of the Rio Grande depression. The mountains formed during the Laramide revolution were reduced in early Tertiary time to a low-lying erosion surface or peneplain. A slowly subsiding basin then formed and was maintained until late Tertiary time, when it was broken by the normal faults which now bound the Rio Grande depression, leaving some of the Tertiary basin deposits on the western mountain block. Erosion of the larger part of these Tertiary rocks has left exposed on the summit of San Pedro Mountain a large area of the exhumed early Tertiary peneplain.