Week 6 - Sierra Nevada Mountains - Geological Interpretation

This week I visited the Sierra Nevada Mountain ranges located in California. From the below geological maps, California's faulting activity is rather abundant and complex.

source: https://muir-way.com/products/sierra-nevada-mountains-map



                                                                                                                                                                                                       source: https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/fam/

These active faults have cause the mountain range to move up over time. There is much debate over how old this mountain range may be. It has originally been thought that the mountain could have been experiencing its uplift as soon as 3 to 5 million years ago. However there are recent studies from fossils which suggest that the Sierra could have been formed 40 million years ago. This would be during the Eocene time.

To aid helping this debunking this I believe I would need the following pieces of information. I would want to study the superposition in order to interpret the geological time frames. I would also like to study the current erosion from the mountain to try to draw chronological time correlations. And lastly I think we need to analyze the fossils in depth using as many of the new dating technologies.