Mount Diablo Research Paper

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Anthony Sengsack Feighner Geology 1 28 October 2012 Mount Diablo is a mountain in Contra Costa County, California in the San Francisco Bay Area, located south of Clayton and northeast of Danville. It has an isolated upthrust peak of 3,864 feet (1,178 m), visible from most of the San Francisco Bay Area and much of northern California. Mount Diablo appears from many angles to be a double pyramid and includes many subsidiary peaks, the largest and closest of which is the other half of the double pyramid, North Peak, nearly as high in elevation at 3,557 feet (1,084m) and about one mile northeast of the main summit. Mount Diablo is sacred to many California Native American peoples, according to Miwok mythology and Ohlone mythology, it was…show more content…
The mountain is the result of geologic compression and uplift caused by the movements of the Earth's plates. The mountain lies between converging earthquake faults and continues to grow slowly. While the principal faults in the region are of the strike-slip type, a significant thrust fault (with no surface trace) is found on the mountain's southwest flank. The uplift and subsequent weathering and erosion have exposed ancient oceanic Jurassic and Cretaceous age rocks that now form the summit. The mountain grows from three to five millimeters each year. The upper portion of the mountain is made up of volcanic and sedimentary deposits of what once was one or more island arcs of the Pacific Plate dating back to the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, between 90 and 190 million years ago. During this time, the Pacific Plate was subducting beneath the North American continent. These deposits were scraped off the top and accreted onto the North American Plate. This resulted in the highly distorted and fractured basalt and serpentine of the Mount Diablo Ophiolite and meta sediments of the Franciscan complex around the summit. East of the subduction zone, a basin was filling with sediment from the Sierra further to the east. Up to 60,000 feet of sandstone, mudstone, and limestone of the Great Valley Sequence were deposited from 66 to 150 million years ago. These deposits are now found faulted against the Ophiolite and Franciscan deposits. Over the past 20 million years continental deposits have been periodically laid down and subsequently jostled around by the newly-formed San Andreas Fault, forming the Coast Ranges. Within the last four million years, local faulting has resulted in compression, folding, buckling, and erosion, bringing the various formations into their current position. This faulting action continues to change the shape of Mount Diablo, along with the rest of the Coast Ranges. The

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