"This comprehensive field guide takes you on a six-day, west-to-east geologic journey across the Mesozoic magmatic arc of the central Sierra Nevada in California. It summarizes field, structural, geochemistry, and geochronology data collected on individual intrusions, basement terranes intruded by these intrusions, Mesozoic volcanic-sedimentary sections, and from several Sierra Nevada-wide datasets"--Provided by publisher.

A study of the structure, composition, and pre-Tertiary history of the Sierra Nevada batholith in the Mariposa 1 by 2 quadrangle.

A bona fide classic, originally published in 1872, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada is still exciting reading. It describes the perils and pleasures experienced by Clarence King (1842-1901) while conducting the first geological survey of California in the 1860s. His language was equal to the marvels he found, and here with unfading brilliance are his accounts of scaling such mountains as Tyndall, Shasta, and Whitney. The chapters on the Yosemite Valley and surrounding High Sierras were written while he was surveying the boundaries of a newly designated national park. There are also delightful vignettes of western characters, including a Sierra artist and a family of Pike County hog farmers. &

From ski towns to national parks, fresh fruit to environmental lawsuits, the Sierra Nevada has changed the way Americans live. Whether and where there was gold to be mined redefined land, mineral, and water laws. Where rain falls (and where it doesn't) determines whose fruit grows on trees and whose appears on slot machines. All this emerges from the geology of the range and how it changed history, and in so doing, changed the country. The Mountains That Remade America combines geology with history to show how the particular forces and conditions that created the Sierra Nevada have effected broad outcomes and influenced daily life in the United States in the past and how they continue to do so today. Drawing connections between events in historical geology and contemporary society, Craig H. Jones makes geological science accessible and shows the vast impact this mountain range has had on the American West.

"Rough-Hewn Land tells the geologic story of the American West--the story of its rocks, rivers, mountains, earthquakes, and mineral wealth, including gold. It tells it by taking you on a 1000-mile-long field trip across the rough side of the continent from the California coast to the Rocky Mountains. This book puts you on the outcrop, geologic hammer in hand, to explore the evidence for how the spectacular, rough-hewn lands of the West came to be. When North America broke free from Eurasia and Africa some 200 million years ago, it triggered a cascade of violent geologic events that shaped the West we see today. As the west-moving continent crunched across the seabed of the ancient Pacific, islands and assorted pieces of ocean floor collected against its prow to build California--and plant gold there too. Meanwhile, mountains squeezed upward from California to Colorado, and vast quantities of molten rock seeded the crust with precious metals while spewing volcanic fire across the land. Later, the land stretched like an accordion to form the washboard-like Basin and Range province and Great Basin within it, while California began to crackle along the San Andreas fault. Throughout the West today, a near-constant drumroll of earthquakes testifies to a world still reshaping itself in response to the ceaseless movements of the Earth's tectonic plates. Rough-Hewn Land weaves these stories into the human history of the West. As we follow the adventures of John C. Frémont, Mark Twain, the Donner party, and other historic characters, we see how geologic forces have shaped human experience, just as they direct the fate of the West today"--

At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.

This volume documents advances in our knowledge of catastrophic landslides, providing a worldwide survey of catastrophic landslide events. It draws on South America to illustrate dramatically the impact of these phenomena on human populations. The occurrence of catastrophic landslides, including site-specific insights, is shown through six events of the past 20 years. Several other chapters focus on the mechanisms involved with catastrophic landsides both in relation to geologic factors in a particular geographic area as well as to specific geologic processes.