Guadalupe Mountains

Guadalupe Mountains
Guadalupe Mountains
Highest point
Peak	Guadalupe Peak
Elevation	8,751 ft (2,667 m)
Coordinates	31°53′28″N 104°51′36″W / 31.89111°N 104.86000°W / 31.89111; -104.86000
Dimensions
Length	65 mi (105 km)[1]
Width	20 mi (32 km)
Geography
Guadalupe Mountains
Country	United States
States	Texas and  New Mexico
Borders on	Sacramento Mountains and Brokeoff Mountains
Geology
Age of rock	Permian
Type of rock	Carbonate sponge reef complex

The Guadalupe Mountains (Spanish: Sierra de Guadalupe) are a mountain range located in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. The range includes the highest summit in Texas, Guadalupe Peak, 8,751 ft (2,667 m), and the "signature peak" of West Texas, El Capitan, both of which are located within Guadalupe Mountains National Park. The Guadalupe Mountains are bordered by the Pecos River valley and Llano Estacado to the east and north, Delaware Mountains to the south, and Sacramento Mountains to the west. One of the clearest exposures of a prehistoric reef is preserved in the mountain range's bedrock geology.^[2] Bedrock contains fossils of reef-dwelling organisms from the Permian period, and the geology is widely studied, mostly by stratigraphers, paleontologists, and Paleoecologists (see geology section).^[3]

History

Archaeological evidence has shown that people lived over 10,000 years ago in and among the many

The Mescalero Apaches remained in the mountains through the mid-19th century, but they were challenged by an American transportation route at the end of the

Felix McKittrick was one of the first European settlers in the Guadalupe Mountains; he worked cattle during the 1870s.

The Guadalupe Mountains reach their highest point at Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas,^[5] with an elevation of 8,751 feet (2,667 m).^[6] The range lies southeast of the Sacramento Mountains and east of the Brokeoff Mountains. The mountain range extends north-northwest and northeast from Guadalupe Peak in Texas into New Mexico.^[1] The northeastern extension ends about 10 miles (16 km) southwest of Carlsbad, near White's City and Carlsbad Caverns National Park; the southwest tip ends with El Capitan about 90 miles (140 km) east of El Paso. The mountains rise more than 3,000 feet (910 m) above the arid floor of the Chihuahuan Desert.^[5] The Guadalupe Mountains are surrounded by the South Plains to the east and north, Delaware Mountains to the south, and Sacramento Mountains to the west.

The northwestern extension, bounded by a dramatic escarpment known as "The Rim", extends much further into New Mexico, to near the Sacramento Mountains. The range is bounded on the north by Four Mile Canyon; on the east by the valley of the

The Guadalupe Mountains are underlain by Permian aged sedimentary rocks. Although the rocks are now thousands of feet above sea level, sediments that form the rock were deposited in the Delaware Basin, which was a shallow marine coastal setting at the southern edge of what was then the North American craton.^[7] Sediments were deposited in an environment that is thought to be similar to present day environments in the Bahamas or southern Florida (U.S.), where warm climate and clear water is a favorable environment for photosynthetic organisms and formation of carbonate reefs.^[8] As the organisms die and are buried, calcium carbonate incorporated from sea water into shells forms Limestone rock, preserving fossils and their ecology in the rock record. Carbonate production in the Delaware Basin formed the Capitan Reef, one of the most extensive and continuous prehistoric limestone reefs now exposed at the land surface. Buried organic matter formed oil and natural gas resources, and ~250,000 wells have been drilled in the surrounding region.^[8]

Bedrock that formed in shallow oceans of the Delaware Basin were likely uplifted during the Cenozoic period. Subduction of the Farrallon plate underneath the Western United States thickened buoyant continental crust and uplifted the Colorado Plateau across much of the southwestern United States.^[9] Following complete subduction of the Farrallon plate in the mid-late Cenozoic, lateral compression was released along the western margin of the North American tectonic plate, and a transform plate boundary formed on the western United States along the San Andreas Fault.^[10] Lateral extension of the Colorado Plateau occurred as a result, forming topographic relief and mountainous features along crustal extension features in the Basin and Range province, such as the Rio Grande rift west of the Guadalupe Mountains. A mechanism similar to extension in the Rio Grande rift is thought to have generated topographic relief in the Guadalupe Mountains, and the timing of topographic relief generation has been estimated to ~20 million years ago using cave speleothem records and interpreted to reflect drainage of subsurface aquifers as topographic relief was generated along the margin of the mountain range.^[11]

The Guadalupe Mountains are mainly carved by a series of NW-SE trending canyons leading to exposure of marine rocks at their current elevation. In the dry, semi-arid environment, continuous limestone bedrock of the Capitan Reef forms large prominent cliffs traceable across the landscape. These cliffs are typically exposed along the eastern edge of the park. Groundwater circulating through deep fractures dissolves limestone and forms extensive cave networks, including the Carlsbad Caverns.

Ecology

Three major ecosystems are contained within the mountain range. First, deserts exhibit

• Beach Mountains
• Trans-Pecos

References