What type of igneous intrusion is El Capitan?
El Capitan Granite is a type of granite (also see granodiorite), in a large area near El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park, California, United States. The granite forms part of the Tuolumne Intrusive Suite (also known as Tuolumne Batholith), one of the four major intrusive suites within the Sierra Nevada.
Does El Capitan mean Captain?
El Capitan (“the captain”, “the chief”) was taken to be a loose Spanish translation of the local Native American name for the cliff, variously transcribed as “To-to-kon oo-lah” or “To-tock-ah-noo-lah”. El Capitan is now one of the most popular formations in the world for climbers.
What created El Capitan?
El Capitan was born of fire. The 3,000-foot-tall, 1.5-mile-wide granite cliff that rises up from the present-day Yosemite Valley in central California started forming roughly 220 million years ago, when ancestral North America collided with a neighboring tectonic plate under the Pacific Ocean.
What is the composition of El Capitan?
El Capitan is composed almost entirely of a pale, coarse-grained granite approximately 100 MYA (million years old). In addition to El Capitan, this granite forms most of the rock features of the western portions of Yosemite Valley.
Was El Capitan formed by lava or magma?
In a new paper, Karlstrom and colleagues suggest that structures such as El Capitan contain the historical record — dating to tens to hundreds of millions of years ago — of magma that doesn’t explode as Mount St.
How old is the granite in Yosemite National Park?
between 120 and 85 million years ago
Yosemite is situated within the 70-mile-wide, 300-mile-long Sierra Nevada Batholith. Most of the granite in the Sierra Nevada Batholith was emplaced between 120 and 85 million years ago during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. This is one of the most rapid periods of continental crust assembly known.
Can you sport climb El Capitan?
One of the most striking formations in the Yosemite Valley, El Capitan measures in at about 3,000 feet (1,000 meters) tall from base to summit. Aside from its technical difficulty, its sheer height is one of the factors that makes ascending El Capitan such a challenging feat for trad climbers and sport climbers.
What are plutons made of?
In geology, a pluton is a body of intrusive igneous rock (called a plutonic rock) that is crystallized from magma slowly cooling below the surface of the Earth. Plutons include batholiths, stocks, dikes, sills, laccoliths, lopoliths, and other igneous formations.
What type of rock is El Capitan made of?
granite
One of the park’s most notable landmarks, the granite monolith features nearly vertical walls and stands 7,569 feet (2,307 metres) above sea level and towers some 3,600 feet (1,100 metres) over the western end of Yosemite Valley; at its base is the Merced River.
What is El Capitan known for?
El Capitan, also known as El Cap, is a vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park, located on the north side of Yosemite Valley, near its western end. The granite monolith is about 3,000 feet from base to summit along its tallest face and is a popular objective for rock climbers.
Why is it called El Capitan OS X?
Following the Northern California landmark-based naming scheme introduced with OS X Mavericks, El Capitan was named after a rock formation in Yosemite National Park. El Capitan is the final version to be released under the name OS X. OS X El Capitan received far better reviews than did Yosemite.
What type of rock is El Capitan?
El Capitan (Spanish: El Capitán; The Captain or The Chief’’) is a vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park, located on the north side of Yosemite Valley, near its western end. The granite monolith is about 3,000 feet (914 m) from base to summit along its tallest face and is a popular objective for rock climbers.
What are the features of OS X El Capitan?
Features. OS X El Capitan supports Metal, Apple’s graphics API introduced in iOS 8 to speed up performance in games and professional applications. Apple’s typeface San Francisco replaces Helvetica Neue as the system typeface. OS X El Capitan also adopts LibreSSL in replacement of OpenSSL used in previous versions.