Colorado River Corridor 

This portion of the Basin and Range along the lower Colorado River is distinguished by the exposure of metamorphic core complexes and regional low-angle normal faults called detachment faults. The formation of the core complexes (~20 to 10 million years ago) pre-date much of the Basin and Range high-angle normal faulting. The middle crust was heated and expanded, forming blister-like masses of gneiss and schist. Portions of the overlying upper crust were not competent enough to uplift without sliding off the axis of these blisters. Small basins created during the detachment period filled with alluvial fan, stream, and lacustrine sediments as well as volcanic tuffs and lava flows. The boundary between the extensional corridor and the rest of the Basin and Range in Mohave County is along the Black Mountains, Mohave Mountains and the Buckskin-Rawhide Mountains.

Campus Display Photos

Comments or suggestions about these Science web pages to: mrourke@mohave.edu. This web page was last updated by Tawna Evans on November 30, 2004. The following material is copyrighted (2004), but is free to use for non-commercial educational purposes. Please give credit to any used material to D. Wilson.

of Mohave County

COLORADO RIVER CORRIDOR ROCKS - Each digit on picture represents a rock.

1. Banded Gneiss
2. Amphibolite
3. Altered Dacite Dike
4. Megabreccia
5. Conglomerate
6. Vesicular Basalt
7. Banded rhyloite
8. Air-fall Tuff Breccia
9. Fanglomerate
10. Peach Springs Tuff
11. Porphyritic granite
12. Freshwater Limestone