If you’re driving from Santa Fe to Albuquerque, you might not be aware you’re passing by billions of years of geologic time.
The southernmost Rocky Mountains are visible to the northeast, their peaks and valleys formed by differential erosion of rocks that were once molten granite or were deposited over a billion years ago as sand and silt, subjected to great pressures and high temperatures under an ancient and long-vanished mountain range, then uplifted in another mountain-building episode that reached from New Mexico to Alaska beginning some 75 million years ago.
Drivers traveling south from Santa Fe can see on their left the Ortiz Mountains, formed by molten material between 36 and 27 million years ago. To the right are the volcanic vents of the Cerro del Río volcanic field, formed 2 to 3 million years ago. La Bajada hill is at the eroded edge of a lava field.
Below the lava scarp are rock outcrops that were sands and muds deposited during the age of dinosaurs, later buried and lithified. A couple of gypsum mines to the left are dug into deposits left by saline lakes. The Río Galisteo filled its valley with recently deposited sediments eroded from the mountains to the east.
Visible next are the Sandias. At the base is the Sandia Granite, emplaced 3 to 6 miles underground, crystalized some 1.45 billion years ago. These pinkish rocks (watermelon colored, hence the Spanish name) are overlain by limestones and shales that preserve shells and coral fragments deposited in ancient seas. The difference in age between these two adjacent rocks is over a billion years, a testament to ancient uplifts and erosion.
The scarp of the mountain above Albuquerque is dramatic, the result of 6 miles of vertical movement along the Sandia Fault.
Farther south is a group of volcanoes to the west, across the valley of the Río Grande. These are volcanic necks, lava that cooled and hardened inside a cinder cone and then later became exposed when the softer cinders that formed the volcano’s flanks eroded away.
Volcanoes visible from the highway when approaching Albuquerque erupted 210,000 to 156,000 years ago, the blink of an eye in geologic time.
Once in the city, drivers see the results of humans’ attempt to harness geologic processes of erosion and deposition: concrete-lined arroyos and flood mitigation levees.
A concise account of the geology along I-25 from Santa Fe to Albuquerque is part of the second edition of this handbook, whose first edition many drivers likely keep in the glove box. The handy guidebook includes many highways across the state, helping readers understand what they see through their car windows.
An introductory chapter explains geologic concepts as well as the history of the earth’s rocks. Subsequent chapters explain the geology of each of New Mexico’s four regions: the Colorado Plateau, the Río Grande Rift, the High Plains, and the Volcanic Southwest.
The second edition is longer — by 100 pages — and is even better than the first. Included again in the second edition are numerous maps of New Mexico’s rocks, with information about their ages and compositions. The book’s new four-color maps are easier to read than the previous two-color versions in the first edition.
A colorful timeline documents the earth’s geologic ages along with their names and dates.
Cross-sections, also in color, explain how the rocks lie at depth, as if the illustration was taking a vertical slice of the land from mountain tops to thousands of feet below sea level.
The book includes dozens of illustrations, explaining what travelers can see along the side of the roads: orange and yellow sandstone cliffs at Ghost Ranch, the black volcanic edges of the Río Grande Gorge, white gypsum sand dunes in the Tularosa Basin, and more.
Dates, environmental conditions when the rocks were deposited, folding and faulting as mountains rose and rifts formed valleys, even the history of mining in the state are a few of the book’s geologic topics.
The original guidebook was published in 1987, written by Halka Chronic. The revised edition was co-authored by her daughter, Lucy Chronic, now an Idaho resident. Co-author Magdalena Sandoval Donahue is a native northern New Mexican living in Albuquerque.
The authors understand the state well, write clearly, and have a knack for inserting interesting tidbits about the state’s history and landscape.
This guidebook is an excellent compendium of New Mexico’s geology, both for beginners and experienced earth scientists and should be required for every car that travels New Mexico highways.
This novel by an Albuquerque author about parenting will appeal to a wide variety of readers, particularly those interested in family dynamics, travel, geology, and piloting small planes.
Will Ross is a geologist living in New Jersey who is tired of his job at the Port of Philadelphia. When he reads about a job opportunity in Turkey working at a dam construction site on the headwaters of the Euphrates River, he prepares to move overseas. But he discovers his ex-wife has descended so far into alcoholism that she is unable to care for the three children with whom they share custody.
Ross packs his family off to the dam site in Turkey’s remote Anatolian mountains without telling his children the trip is more than a vacation. The novel is an examination of how the children cope with being suddenly uprooted from their school, their friends, their sports teams, and their mother. The move is easier on some, yet the sudden changes leave lasting scars.
To the rescue comes a stray dog, a neighbor boy, and a sympathetic schoolteacher, as well as the rugged mountains of their new home.
The author gives readers a short course in the geology of the eastern Mediterranean and an explanation of how moving continental plates are still forming Turkey’s mountains. The puzzle for Ross and fellow engineers is to build a safe dam among rocks that are full of cavities in an area always threatened by earthquakes and landslides.
He buys a 1962 Cessna single-engine airplane and studies the local geology from the air, allowing the author to include vivid landscape descriptions.
The dam construction problems are vast, and at the end of the book, the reader is not sure Ross has been able to solve them — or repair the trauma he caused by moving his family. The latter part of the book follows the family’s experiences after they leave Turkey: Ross’ career, the schoolteacher’s relationships, the children’s college and jobs.
If the author writes another novel, she should explore the life of the middle child, who seems most scarred by his father’s parenting decisions. He chooses a career similar to — yet opposite of — his father’s: He works at dismantling dams in the U.S. ◀
