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| “Mount Whitney.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Aug. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Whitney. |
Mount Whitney is California's tallest mountain, tallest in the contiguous United States. It has a very steep eastern slope compared to its western slope, due to the Sierra Nevada fault zone and the way the plates are shifting. The granite that makes up most of this mountain was formed deep underground from molten rock and has been thrust upwards due to plate movement. Moore (1987) notes that the site is about 80-87 million years old, however, it may have not have had the exposed granite for much longer than 2-10 million years as it would have taken erosion that long to expose the amount of granite seen today. I would request to examine existing data that has already been collected about this mountain, access to equipment for scientifically dating/identifying samples and their chemical composition and permission to take samples from various sections, specifically from different sides of the fault that has formed this mountain. The existing data that has already been collected would be useful as a starting point for my own research and a way to backup any of my own findings. Access to equipment to date and identify samples can be compared to other samples to help date and tell the story of this site, and permission to collect the samples for my research would be required as a matter of course.
Moore, J.G. (1987) Mount Whitney Quadrangle, Inyo and Tulare Counties, California Analytic Data. U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY BULLETIN 1760, retrieved from https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/1760/report.pdf
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