*** Welcome to piglix ***

Pikes Peak granite


The Pikes Peak granite is a 1.08 billion year old widespread geologic formation found in the central part of the Front Range of Colorado. It is a coarse-grained pink to light red syenogranite with minor gray monzogranite, and it has a distinctive brick-red appearance where it outcrops. The granite gets its name from the 14,115-foot (4,302 m) Pikes Peak mountain, which is made up almost entirely of this rock.

The Pikes Peak granite was emplaced in three major intrusive events in the southern Front Range, now exposed in Colorado's Lost Creek Wilderness, Buffalo Peaks Wilderness, and Pikes Peak. It is the geochemically potassic series of plutons compromising most of the Pikes Peak batholith, a batholith formed of two major types of plutons, the potassic Pikes Peak granite and later plutons, plus late stage sodic syenite and granite plutons. Both the batholith and the Pikes Peak granite are A-type, meaning granites that originate in anorogenic, or non mountain building, tectonic settings, with an alkaline geochemistry and arising from more anhydrous magmas.

Over the next billion years, the now cooled granite was gradually exposed through erosion of overlying rocks. About 60 million years ago, parts of the Western U.S. were subjected to a series of uplifts, known as the Laramide orogeny, that eventually formed the modern Rocky Mountains and raised Pikes Peak to its current height. Pikes Peak, like other portions of Colorado Rockies is still being uplifted today as a part of larger tectonic processes effecting the Western United States.

Today, the Pikes Peak Batholith and Granite is exposed over a large part of the central Front Range of Colorado. It is found as far north as the southern slopes of Mount Evans west of Denver, west to South Park, and as far south as Cañon City. The batholith is about 80 miles (130 km) long in the north-south direction and about 25 miles (40 km) wide east to west. Even more of it remains hidden underground. Geologists have found the granite at the bottom of deep wells on the plains and magnetic sensors have detected it as much as 80 miles (130 km) to the east.


...
Wikipedia

...