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The rift can be observed on location at Rio Grande National Forest, White Sands National Park, Santa Fe National Forest, and Cibola National Forest, among other locations. The Rio Grande rift has been an important site for humans for a long time, because it provides a north–south route that follows a major river.
The Rio Grande (Rio del Norte) as mapped in 1718 by Guillaume de L'Isle. Río Grande is Spanish for "Big River" and Río Grande del Norte means "Big River of the North". In English, Rio Grande is pronounced either / ˈ r iː oʊ ˈ ɡ r æ n d / or / ˈ r iː oʊ ˈ ɡ r ɑː n d eɪ /.
A mechanism similar to extension in the Rio Grande rift is thought to have generated topographic relief in the Guadalupe Mountains, and the timing of topographic relief generation has been estimated to ~20 million years ago using cave speleothem records and interpreted to reflect drainage of subsurface aquifers as topographic relief was ...
The deepest portion of the rift is along the Velarde graben, which is up to 5 km deep. [6] The Rio Grande became established in the basin in the Pliocene, around 4 million years ago. Volcanic activity in the Cerros del Rio periodically dammed the river and created a large lake in the Espanola basin. [3]
The Santa Fe Group is widely defined as basin-filling sedimentary and volcanic rocks of the Rio Grande rift. [1] These range in age from late Oligocene to Pleistocene. The oldest formations in the group correspond to the earliest structural deformation associated with rifting.
The Rio Grande rift takes the form of a series of basins, each offset to the right from the previous basin as one travels along the rift. The Caja del Rio volcanic field lies almost on top of the Bajada Constriction Zone, which is the zone of offset between the Albuquerque Basin to the southwest and the Espanola Basin to the northeast. [5]
The area is part of the Rio Grande rift, where the Earth's crust is being stretched and thinned. The rift is characterized by deep sedimentary basins, recent faulting and volcanic activity, and unusually high heat flow upwards from the Earth's mantle. Kilbourne Hole and Hunt's Hole are located on the same north-trending fault of the Fitzgerald ...
NASA satellite photo of typical Basin and Range topography across central Nevada. The Basin and Range Province includes much of western North America.In the United States, it is bordered on the west by the eastern fault scarp of the Sierra Nevada and spans over 500 miles (800 km) to its eastern border marked by the Wasatch Fault, the Colorado Plateau and the Rio Grande Rift.