Week 1-Grand Canyon's Igneous Composition

Credit: Scientific School

I visited the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona this past summer. One of the things that I did was to ascend all the way to the bottom of the canyon. At the bottom of the canyon there are precambrian basement rocks that are igneous.These rocks are made my flowing magma that are cooled and hardened. The specific type of rocks that are in the basement layer include a pinkish rock that I really liked called Zoroaster Granite and they are about 1,700 to 2,000 million years old. The granite gets its color from the sediments of sandstone, limestone and shale that were present at the time of the magma flows and then metamorphosed into the granite you see today.

Credit: geology.com

Granite is a coarse-grained, light-colored igneous rock that is intrusive, meaning that magma is forced into older rocks in the earth's crust and that solidifies beneath the earth to be uncovered later. Granite is mainly composed of quartz, feldspar and mica minerals. This particular granite has been exposed due to years and years of weathering from the Colorado River and different weather patterns that formed within.