New Mexico's Magnificent Sandia Mountain The Complete Geological Story

About this book

The magnificent Sandia Mountain forms an enormous rampart towering over the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Regionally, the feature's distinctive "whaleback" profile utterly dominates the horizon within a huge area of central New Mexico. This book provides the complete geologic story of the mountain's origin – a story given within the context of the greater American Southwest. The text is richly illustrated, producing a reader-friendly narrative understandable to the non-geologist. The mountain and its surroundings are the end-products of a long sequence of geologic events spanning a vast period of 1.7 billion years, but the uplift we call today's Sandia Mountain was formed quite recently. In this way, it differs in origin from the Rocky Mountains, which are located nearby but are much older. Paradoxically, then, what we see today is a relatively new mountain made from very old rocks.

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Biography

Dirk Van Hart earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees in geology, and in 1965 began his professional career as a petroleum geologist. During the next two decades, a gypsy life led him and his family to residences in Oklahoma, Texas, California, Guatemala, and Ecuador. A career change in 1986 brought him to Albuquerque, New Mexico. For the next 17 years, his work as a geologist included months-long stints in Italy and Belize, a semester as a student high-school teacher, and eventually as a contractor to Sandia National Laboratories as part of a team characterizing the geology of Kirtland Air Force Base. After semi-retirement in 2003, he worked for five years as a geological consultant until his final retirement in 2008 when he began writing. This is his third book, after Old Forty-Four: A Historical and Geological Excursion Over New Mexico's Old Route 44 and Camps and Campsites of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in New Mexico 1933-1942, both from Sunstone Press.