Caldera
The mountains in the Black Range were formed by massive volcanic energy. And by that I mean a scale that dwarfs all of human history.
By way of comparison, we know a lot about the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, which blasted some 18 cubic kilometers of material. At the climax of Krakatoa, the blasts sounded like nearby cannon to people 3,500 kilometers away, and the shockwaves created 100-foot tsunamis. This energy, we estimate equivalent to 200 Megatons TNT or 4 times more than the largest nuclear device tested by man.
Now here in the Black Range, some millions of years ago the land erupted in scale magnitudes greater than Krakatoa! The total material blasted we estimate at 1450-2050 cubic kilometers. Now this happened so long ago we don't know how fast it happened, so there's no way to tell if the explosions were actually more powerful than Krakatoa, or if they were of much greater duration and more continuous. But to complete the comparison imagine the most powerful bomb type set off over a thousand times. The formation of Emory Caldera and the subsequent uplift and erosion create the mountains seen here. This photo shows a portion of the Emory Caldera, but the formation is huge and difficult to differentiate on today's satellite images.
General geology reference, with lots of diagrams and maps:
geoinfo.nmt.edu/tour/federal/monuments/gila_cliff_dwellin...
www.fs.usda.gov/detail/r3/landmanagement/resourcemanageme...
Caldera
The mountains in the Black Range were formed by massive volcanic energy. And by that I mean a scale that dwarfs all of human history.
By way of comparison, we know a lot about the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, which blasted some 18 cubic kilometers of material. At the climax of Krakatoa, the blasts sounded like nearby cannon to people 3,500 kilometers away, and the shockwaves created 100-foot tsunamis. This energy, we estimate equivalent to 200 Megatons TNT or 4 times more than the largest nuclear device tested by man.
Now here in the Black Range, some millions of years ago the land erupted in scale magnitudes greater than Krakatoa! The total material blasted we estimate at 1450-2050 cubic kilometers. Now this happened so long ago we don't know how fast it happened, so there's no way to tell if the explosions were actually more powerful than Krakatoa, or if they were of much greater duration and more continuous. But to complete the comparison imagine the most powerful bomb type set off over a thousand times. The formation of Emory Caldera and the subsequent uplift and erosion create the mountains seen here. This photo shows a portion of the Emory Caldera, but the formation is huge and difficult to differentiate on today's satellite images.
General geology reference, with lots of diagrams and maps:
geoinfo.nmt.edu/tour/federal/monuments/gila_cliff_dwellin...
www.fs.usda.gov/detail/r3/landmanagement/resourcemanageme...