Introduction and General Overview

 

Geographic Location

The range is located just west of the Basin and Range physiographic province and east of the Great Valley of southern and Central California.  The high Sierra, which is the focus here, is located in south-central California.  The mean elevation of the range is just below 3 kilometers.

General Geology

The Sierra Nevada is filled with stunning scenery and amazing topography. The history of the range has been marked by several episodes of tectonic development with the latest episode continuing through the present day.  The main composition of the Sierra Nevada range is a granitic batholith created between 210 to 80 Ma.  The batholith was created as a result of arc volcanism related to the subducting Farallon slab to the west.  The batholith shows typical arc type compositional distributions with more mafic batholithic compositions to the west and gradually growing more felsic to the east [Bateman and Dodge, 1970].  Low Volume Cenozoic Basaltic magmatism can also be found within the southern Sierra. This could possibly indicate a shift to an extensional environment related to deformation seen  in the Basin and Range province to the east .  Today we can see exposure of mid to lower crustal plutonic rocks in the southern Sierra and Tehachapi mountains which is probably related to a Suture between continental and oceanic basement on the western side of the range [Jones et al., 1994].  These outcrops are believed to have been equilibrated at a depth of ~30 km [Pickett and Saleeby, 1996] indicating the tremendous volume of the original batholith.