are a 30 mile wide volcanic field with many separate small volcanoes, rather than one giant volcano. Here we reconstruct one of the youngest eruptions in the Pinacate volcanic field (Sonora, Mexico)and estimate the volumes of the lava flows, scoria cone, and tephra units. Image is centered at 31.84˚N, 113.47˚W. The United States/Mexico border runs across the upper right corner of the image. Pinacate volcano is a young volcanic field of maars, tuff rings, more than 500 basaltic cinder cones in the Sonoran desert in NW Mexico, a nearly unpopulated region between Arizona and the Gulf of California. The field today is part of El Pinacate and Gran… The larger circular craters seen in the image are a type of volcano known as a "maar", which erupts violently when rising magma encounters groundwater, producing highly pressurized steam that powers explosive eruptions. Apollo 14's Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell, and Apollo 17's Jack Schmitt trained here in Feb. This booklet is your field guide to the geology of these splendid desert landscapes. Space Radar Image of Pinacate Volcanic Field, Mexico This spaceborne radar image shows the Pinacate Volcanic Field in the state of Sonora, Mexico, about 150 kilometers (93 miles) southeast of Yuma, Arizona. Volcanic Field James T. Gutmann The Pinacate is a special place thanks largely to its geology. The Pinacate Peaks lie just north of the fishing resort of Puerto Peñasco. The Pinacate Peaks (Sierra Pinacate, O'odham: Cuk Doʼag) are a group of volcanic peaks and cinder cones located mostly in the Mexican state of Sonora along the international border adjacent to the U.S. state of Arizona, surrounded by the vast sand dune field of the Gran Desierto de Altar, at the desert's southeast.[1]. The Pinacate volcanic field is located in northwest Sonora, Mexico, and comprises a 1500 km 2 area of lava flows with over 400 scoria cones and 8 maars (Gutmann, 2007) . The crater rim in the center of the photo is that of Crater Elegante, a 1.6-km-wide maar. Most of the rock fell into the space formerly occupied by gravel beneath the flows. Monogenetic volcanic fields of Quaternary age like this one are scattered across all the tectonically active regions of the Earth; more than fifty lie within 1000 km of Pinacate. This is an active volcanic field and future eruptions are anticipated. Surrounded by the Sonora Desert, this field contains more than 300 volcanic vents and cinder cones, including at least 10 maar craters. This rugged volcanic terrain made the Pinacate a … Maar-calderas created by steam activity are common enough to be considered major features of monogenetic volcanic fields; sixteen of those "Fifty Fields" have them. The Pinacate Peaks (Sierra Pinacate, O'odham: Cuk Doʼag) are a group of volcanic peaks and cinder cones located mostly in the Mexican state of Sonora along the international border adjacent to the U.S. state of Arizona, surrounded by the vast sand dune field of the Gran Desierto de Altar, at the desert's southeast. Here we reconstruct one of the youngest eruptions in the Pinacate volcanic field (Sonora, Mexico) and estimate the volumes of the lava flows, scoria cone, and tephra units. Thumbnail Medium Original. Pinacate National Park and Biosphere Reserve is a 770-square-mile (2,000-square-kilometer) volcanic field in the Sonora province of Mexico, near the Arizona border. English: The Pinacate volcanic field is a roughly 55 x 60 km area containing numerous maars, tuff rings, and cinder cones in NW México near the head of the Gulf of California. At its core lies the Sierra Pinacate, a central massif of old lava flows that is mantled with and surrounded by younger flows and cinder cones. The crater rim in the center of the photo is that of Crater Elegante, a 1.6-km-wide maar. Pinacate Volcanic Field, Mexico. There were two distinct episodes of tephra production, Tephra Unit 1 (T1)followed by Tephra Unit 2 (T2). While a milestone that was not the culmination of his love affair with the Pinacate volcanic field. Much of its surface is covered with bombs of sizes that rival the giants of Germany’s Eifel District. Padre Eusebio Kino, founder of many Spanish missions in the Sonoran Desert, explored here in 1698 and several times later. The most recent volcanic activity was about 11,000 years ago. The Pinacates (the name means stink bug!) NASA Information and Satellite Image: Pinacate Mountains, http://www.biology.ed.ac.uk/research/groups/jdeacon/desertecology/pinacate.htm, http://www.desertinvasion.us/areas/pinacate_res.html, Official Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve website, Global Volcanism Program: Pinacate Mountains, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pinacate_Peaks&oldid=929892691, Articles containing O'odham-language text, Articles containing Spanish-language text, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 8 December 2019, at 22:52. More than 300 volcanic vents occur in the Pinacate field, including cinder cones that experienced small eruptions as recently as 1934. Pinacate has three giants that rival anything in Africa as well as a bunch of smaller ones. The Pinacate volcanic field is a roughly 55 x 60 km area containing numerous maars, tuff rings, and cinder cones. The Pinacate volcanic field (PVF), located in the El Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve of Sonora, Mexico, comprises a 1,500 km2 area of Pleistocene lava flows and contains nearly 400 cinder cones and eight maars. your own Pins on Pinterest All of the Pinacate magmas came through at least some ground water under the field but only about a dozen out of 465 eruptions even noticed the water and interacted with it. The source vent of the eruption is Tecolote volcano (27 ± 6 ka, 40Ar/39Ar). Location. Detailed Description. Pinacate volcano is a young volcanic field of maars, tuff rings, more than 500 basaltic cinder cones in the Sonoran desert in NW Mexico, a nearly unpopulated region between Arizona and the Gulf of California. The field includes one large shield volcano and several hundred cinder cones and associated lava flows. Excavating a crater like the one pictured requires Herculean energies; that hole once held half a billion tons of rock and gravel that was ejected by steam explosions. This website is my Pinacate book. Pinacate Peak in the distance caps the Santa Clara shield volcano, which is dotted with many … U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Gran Desierto de Altar is one of the major sub-ecoregions of the Sonoran Desert, located in the State of Sonora, in northwest Mexico.It includes the only active erg dune region in North America.The desert extends across much of the northern border of the Gulf of California, spanning more than 100 kilometres (62 mi) east to west and over 50 kilometres (31 mi) north to south. The field comprises 2,000 km2 of basaltic volcanic rocks. Copyright ©2013 by Dan Lynch, geologist, beholden to nobody. Among hundreds of volcanic vents and cinder cones are rare maar craters, formed when rising magma met underground water to create pockets of steam that blew nearly circular holes in the … One of the small cones, Tecolote, is unique in the world. The volcanic cinder cone field stains the landscape of bright sand and tall dunes in the El Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve. Pinacate is a monogenic volcanic field in Sonora, Mexico that lies just south of the Arizona border, seventy miles east of where the Colorado River empties into the Sea of Cortez. Pinacate volcan cinder cones 1200+ m / 3,937 ft Northwestern Mexico, 31.77°N / -113.5°W Condition actuelle : normal / en sommeil (1 sur 5) | Reports Pinacate livres [ afficher la carte 1970. Pinacate is a “monogenetic volcanic field,” the most common kind of Quaternary volcanism on earth. Pinacate Volcano Field (Public domain.) Strong sulfur fumarole activity followed the bomb eruption, indurating some of the bomb-covered surfaces solidly enough to hold vertical scarps when the cone melted and the surface cracked apart along a profusion of faults. The United States/Mexico border runs across the upper right corner of the image. Rocks of the Organ Pipe-Pinacate region have been faulted and eroded into mountains and basins typical of the Basin and Range Province of SW North America. The Mexican Spanish word pinacate is derived from the Nahuatl word for the endemic desert stink beetle, pinacatl. In addition, there are a number of maar volcanoes, the most prominent of which is the Elegante Crater. Here we reconstruct one of the youngest eruptions in the Pinacate volcanic field (Sonora, Mexico) and estimate the volumes of the lava flows, scoria cone, and tephra units. Pinacate volcanism is monogenetic and has been intermittently-continuous since initiation in the early … Crater Elegante: a maar volcano in the Quaternary Pinacate volcanic field on the Arizona-Mexico frontier. The field comprises more than 300 small basaltic volcanoes - cinder cones and maars. The cones are monogenetic, each is the product of a single, short eruption of a unique batch of magma that produced less (usually much less) than a tenth cubic km of rock. The source vent of the eruption is Tecolote volcano (27 ± 6 ka, 40 Ar/ 39 Ar). The volcanoes here have erupted here sporadically since about 4 million years ago, probably in association with the opening of the Gulf of California. It is a kilometer-tall Cerro (mountain) rather than Sierra (range) dotted with younger cone volcanoes like Pinacate Peak, the highest point in the field. Pinacate is a 1500 km oval of Lower Sonoran Desert covered with lava flows and cinders of more than 450 small volcanoes distributed across the area. It is dominated topographically by the Sierra Pinacate, a broad, composite volcanic pile in the southern half of the field with a maximum elevation of 1,206 m. Many of these volcanic rocks evidently are of late Most of the round dark spots are cinder cones, and the six larger circles (many with bright sand on their floors) are a special kind of volcanic crater called maars. The crest of the East Ridge subsided into a graben, and three valleys formed in the South Wall, each at the head of a short lava flow. It is a protected Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage site. The Pleistocene-Holocene Pinacate volcanic field encroaches on the Gran Desierto of Sonora, Mexico. The trachyte shield could be called a point-source volcano because its low viscosity magmas seem to have erupted through a small summit conduit system and flowed easily outward and downslope to build a volcanic shield. Oct 14, 2013 - This Pin was discovered by Lynn Recker. The field covers 1800 km2 of desert. The field covers an area of about 60 x 55 km and has been active less than 10,000 years ago. Part of El Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve — Sonora. The Pinacate Volcanic Field Extraordinary basalt volcanism in Northwestern Sonora, Mexico This giant maar-caldera and the trachyte shield volcano on the horizon are two of the features that make what Sykes called "The Pinacate Lava Fields” extraordinary. These magmas were evolved from basalt by fractional crystallization and constitute the entire alkaline rock series from basalt to trachyte. [4], The El Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve is a biosphere reserve, in the spanish language Reserva de la Biosfera el Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar, managed by the Mexican Federal Government's SEMARNAT - the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, in collaboration with the government of the State of Sonora's IMADES agency. The tallest of the peaks is Cerro del Pinacate (also called Volcan Santa Clara), elevation 3,904 feet (1,190 m). The Biosphere Reserve contains young volcanoes, basalt lava flows, and giant maar craters on the Pinacate Volcanic field. This tube-fed pahoehoe flow contrasts sharply with other Pinacate lavas in its great volume, alkali-poor composition and morphologic features, which include novel small structures named "spatter tubes." [5], El Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve. Tecolote appears to have melted internally but I’ll be damned if I know how. Tecolote volcano, Pinacate volcanic field (Sonora, Mexico): A case of highly explosive basaltic volcanism and shifting eruptive styles April 2019 Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 379 Among the youngest lava flows of the Pinacate volcanic field, Sonora, Mexico, is a large outpouring of tholeiite, the Ives flow. I reconstructed the third youngest eruption in the PVF. In 1981, Dan Lynch completed his Ph.D. dissertation, "Genesis and Geochronology of Alkaline Volcanism in the Pinacate Volcanic Field, Northwestern Sonora, Mexico" at the University of Arizona. These volcanoes are monogenetic; a type of volcano produced by single, short duration (<< 10 years) eruptions that use up all of their modest magma bodies. The volcanoes in the Pinacate are monogenetic—meaning they erupt only once and each have a unique magmatic signature. This giant maar-caldera and the trachyte shield volcano on the horizon are two of the features that make what Sykes called "The Pinacate Lava Fields” extraordinary. Cover: The Pinacate volcanic field as imaged by the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) carried onboard the space shuttle Endeavour on April 18, 1994. Dan Lynch’s love affair with the Pinacate Volcanic Field – Pinacate in Stereo. The Pinacate volcanic field is located in northwestern Sonora, Mexico, near the northern end of the Gulf of California. Located in far northwest Sonora, Mexico, the Pinacate volcanic field comprises a 1,500 km2 area of Pleistocene lava flows with over 400 cinder cones and 8 maars. The field today is part of El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. [2], A variety of flora and fauna occur in the Pinacate Mountains, including the sculptural Elephant Tree, Bursera microphylla.[3]. Determining the 40 Ar/ 39 Ar ages of young basaltic volcanic rocks is complicated by many factors, including the possible presence of excess argon and low potassium content. NOTE: In a previous version of this post, I featured the EO-1 ALI image below, and an astute reader pointed out that these peaks, while in the Biosphere Reserve, are not Pinacate Peaks, but rather the Sierra de Rosario range nearby. The field is prominent in satellite photos of this arid region of NW México near the head of the Gulf of California. P-47415 September 19, 1996 This spaceborne radar image shows the Pinacate Volcanic Field in the state of Sonora, Mexico, about 150 kilometers (93 miles) southeast of Yuma, Arizona. Pinacate’s volcanoes are all on continental crust of the Southern Basin & Range geologic province; a colorful background of preCambrian gneisses, Permian and Laramide granites, and mid-Tertiary andesites. 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Booklet is your field guide to the geology of these splendid Desert....