Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows: a Long-standing Geological Puzzle
Andrew Alden, KQED Science Contributor | November 6, 2014

... Tuolumne Meadows is geologically weird because it mixes a wide flat area, typical of weak bedrock, with big humps of clean strong stone, like Lembert Dome, exposed like sculpture in a gallery. But the whole area is in one large body of identical granite, the Cathedral Peak Granodiorite. (Granodiorite has a slightly different blend of minerals from true granite; only geologists notice. Most of the Sierra’s beautiful white “granite” is granodiorite.) The clean crags that Yosemite rock climbers love are cheek by jowl with flat, well-eroded meadows, all in the same rock. How did the glaciers carve the same stuff into such a variety of landforms?

http://blogs.kqed.org/science/2014/11/06/yosemites-tuolumne-meadows-a-long-standing-geological-puzzle/

Here's the link to the scientific study that the KQED article refers to:

http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/24/11/article/i1052-5173-24-11-4.htm



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/07/2014 11:10AM by plawrence.