The Earth Story

Original caption:

Milky Way over the trail to Mount Whitney, Sierra Nevada Mountains, with lights from hikers off to the side.

6 hour timelapse of the Milky Way over the highest part of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The light turns up later in the shot because the moon rises in the background - Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the continental United States, is basically at the center of the frame when it ends.

For your consideration…the Alabama Hills.

Ok, I’ll be honest …I’m secretly hoping someone screams “Nerd!” at me in the comments, because in this post I’m reveling in it. I’ve already got my tickets for the Avengers: Age of Ultron this weekend, and considering that Disney is spending tens of millions of dollars marketing that film, I might as well try to tag along. Either I’ll be stealing attention from their marketing, or helping it, or maybe both. So, for this post (and my next one), I’m delving into geology that appeared in other films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

This image comes from the state of California, just outside of the town of Lone Pine, a place known as the Alabama Hills. In the background, you can see the Sierra Nevada mountain range, with Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental United States, in the distance almost at the center of the frame.

In California, the main mountain range, the Sierra Nevada, runs north-south through the state. On the west side, the Sierras gradually lose elevation and merge into sedimentary basins in the Central Valley, but on the east side, they stop abruptly.

The Sierras are cut on their eastern side by a series of normal faults that have dropped the rocks down and created a deep, sediment-filled basin known as Owens valley. You can see the trace of one of those faults in this image; it basically marks the place where the mountains go from incredibly steep to very flat.

The Alabama Hills sit right in the middle of Owens Valley. They’re made of granite that is very similar to the rocks of the Sierra Nevada, but there are about 3 kilometers of valley floor between them and the Sierras. The Alabama Hills are a block of the Sierras basically trapped in the middle of Owens valley.

These hills are pieces of Sierran granite, but because they are bounded by faults, they didn’t drop down as far as the rest of the valley. The faults around the hills still move, and in fact there was a magnitude 7.4 earthquake along the east side of the Alabama Hills in 1872.

They sit in an incredibly picturesque area. There isn’t a lot of rain, so the hills don’t erode rapidly, but since they’re not big they’re easy to climb on or drive around, and they have the gorgeous Sierra Nevada as a backdrop. These hills are such a great location that they show up throughout Hollywood history. The other name for the portion of land right around the Alabama Hills sums this up pretty well; Movie Flat. If you look in the background of any number of “western” movies, there’s this remarkable habit of Mount Whitney showing up. Django Unchained, Gladiator, Tremors, How the West was Won; the list of films shot here seems endless. Captain Kirk was even buried here.

The Alabama Hills also sit in the rain shadow of the Sierras; they don’t receive much precipitation, making the area great for filming desert scenes. The weathering granite helps as well, it weathers to grus; broken up fragments of the grains in the granite that don’t host much vegetation and give a good impression of a desert when they’re on camera.

That brings me back to Marvel and the original Iron Man. In the 2008 Iron Man film, the Alabama Hills played a key role, standing in for Afghanistan. This spot is where Tony Stark demonstrates the Jericho Missile. In fact, they test the missile on the Sierras; literally on the slopes just south of Mount Whitney. The scene where Stark is attacked and captured by militants, leading to the development of his miniaturized arc reactor, was also filmed right here, in the Alabama Hills. So effectively, the entire Iron Man film series (and the other Avengers movies) got their start right here, in the shadows of Mount Whitney.

So, to paraphrase the movie…ladies and gentlemen, for your consideration…the Alabama Hills.

-JBB

Photo credit: Me! No rights reserved.

1872 Lone Pine Earthquake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1872_Lone_Pine_earthquake

Alabama Hills on Tripadvisor: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g32646-d117177-Reviews-Alabama_Hills-Lone_Pine_California.html

Alabama Hills from the BLM: http://www.blm.gov/ca/st/en/fo/bishop/scenic_byways/alabamas.html

Lone Pine Film Database (39 pages!): http://www.lonepinefilmhistorymuseum.org/index.php?option=com_joodb&view=catalog&Itemid=31

And why not, the video clip: http://www.corporate-aliens.com/quotes/getquote.php?Tony-Stark&quoteid=462

Alabama Hills and the Sierra Nevada Mountains

Mobius Arch in California is hardly remarkable as far as natural arches go, but it draws photographers anyways because it offers the opportunity to photograph Mount Whitney, the tallest peak in the lower 48 states, framed by the arch. The jagged peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains contrast beautifully against the rounded contours of the 2-meter (6 feet) tall Mobius Arch and the other rocks of the Alabama Hills. Despite what their drastically different appearances might suggest, the rocks that make up the two neighboring formations are the same age - both were the result of geologic uplift 100 million years ago. Different geologic processes have shaped them since.

Sometime after the uplift, the Alabama Hills became a moist, highly vegetated region, meaning the granite was chemically weathered by percolating water. This type of erosion creates the rounded rock.

About 5 million years ago, fault-block uplift (the crust is pulled apart and some large blocks are pushed upwards while others collapse downward) created the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The mountains were shaped initially by the uplift, and more recently by glaciers.

The mountains put the Alabama Hills in a rain shadow that killed the vegetation. Over time, the soil eroded away revealing the weather rocks.

- RE

Photo Credit: Barb Ignatius http://bit.ly/1ydIpZV

References: http://on.doi.gov/1xVi2EM

http://bit.ly/1Fmrj98

http://bit.ly/1CpxbNb

A 3 minute video combining still photos from a voyage across the western U.S. Pretty nice.

On top of Mt. Whitney Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, appears in this spectacular photo from the US National Park Service.  Mt. Whitney is the remnant of a giant magmatic body produced about 80 million years ago. At the time, an oceanic plate called the Farallon plate was sinking beneath the state of California and the U.S. West Coast. As this plate entered the mantle and was heated, water and other fluids trapped in it were released. They migrated upward, causing the hot mantle rocks above to melt. Those magmas migrated upward into the crust, building a classic volcanic arc. At some places in the Sierra Nevada, rocks that erupted at Earth’s surface are still preserved, but in the southern part of the mountains, the deep roots of the magma system are exposed.  The Mt. Whitney Pluton is a granodiorite; not quite as silica rich as a granite but still a fairly common rock type from subduction zones. Mt. Whitney is the remnant of a giant magma chamber, a magma body over 50 kilometers long. It likely fed hundreds of volcanic eruptions when it was active. Today it is a giant piece of rock with tightly interlocking crystals, a product of slow cooling within the crust. The fractures you see that define the shape are called joints: fractures that tend to open in rocks when they come up to the surface and pressure on them is released. Mt. Whitney is named for California’s first state geologist, Josiah Dwight Whitney. -JBB Image credit: http://instagram.com/usinterior Read more: http://www.unh.edu/esci/geology-highpoints/california.html http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/content/119/9-10/1185/F2.large.jpg