GEOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF TUCSON REGION
The Tucson region is positioned in the county of Pima in Arizona. The area is renowned for its canyon and desert landscape, which includes the Sonoran desert, ranges of the mountain, and bountiful American native past (Dimmitt et al.;2015). The range and basin forming were as a result of the climax of events that have occurred in the last 40 million years. The region stood as an expanded plain, bare of recent times mountain and evenly interlinked to every enclosing highland.
In the distant past, about 20 to 40 million years, there were large rapid volcanoes in the area. These volcanoes often generated massive explosions in which some of them collapsed, creating basins that were circular called caldera, as evident in the Superstition Mountains and Chiricahua Galiuro. Below it, intense heat increasing into the crust was hot to melt entirely and lessen parts of the continental crust into a thick fluid. The heat led to the attachment of the Pacific Coast to the Pacific Ocean tectonic plate, which was at the moment moving towards the northwest parallel to the significant continent. The application of this movement stretched forces to the region. The range and basin surface being heated and fluidly did not oppose the forces; instead, it distantly extended in a vast geo-taffic pull (McCarty, 2016). After some time, the range and basin surface broke up, leading to massive disruption. Initial stretch action in 20 to 25 million years before was stationed along the mountain lines where immense heat from below was focused. The heat region across Arizona reacted to the stretch action by creating a vast fault region, through which all the ground to the west of the pacific coast was detached. Once disclosed by the faults, the molten granite rock of these mountains surged up further into the series alignment as a result of heat and its elastic nature. These occurrences prevailed for some million years.
Resulting from these events, the pull-apart action rapidly diffused across the whole area, which later would be the present-day range and basin country. About 12 million years before, the entire basis of scope and basin country was affected with the expanding taffy- pull, reaching out thirty to eighty percent more its original span, while the weak crust upwards cracked into many, thin, long segments. All the mountains in the area were concurrently created in this manner. It also brings out the semi lateral trends of the area’s valleys and mountains that are horizontal to the course of pulling. About 8 million years back, the stretching action seized, the slimmed surface chilled, and the range and basin valleys and mountains steadied. Since then, the main geological activities have been the shifting of debris rock away fro the mountains and into the neighboring valleys by the action of the stream.
Nearly to the end of the primary forms of basin and range around 6 million years back, the harsh sideway splitting force began onward the Pacific shoreline. The split at the margin of the split-off region is known as San Andreas fault, which is accountable for the division of the Baja California cape from continental Mexico and the Gulf of California.
Reference
McCarty, K. (Ed.). (2016). A frontier documentary: Sonora and Tucson, 1821–1848. University of Arizona Press.
Dimmitt, M. A., Comus, P. W., Phillips, S. J., & Brewer, L. M. (Eds.). (2015). A natural history of the Sonoran Desert. Univ of California Press.