new mexico

New Mexico

…In the Beginning

• Imagine!–What was the

world like 300 Million years ago?

NM...in the beginning 2013-2014 2

N.M….in the beginning

• Well…–300 million years ago, great inland seas

covered the area and, once in place, they would eventually receded.

– Those waters carried things like sediment and marine life. When the waters receded, they left much of these things behind.

NM...in the beginning 2013-2014

• The waters left layers of sandstone, limestone, and shale.

Banded Sandstone

N.M….in the beginning• 150 million years ago, violent forces literally

tore apart the earth’s crust.• In some place, intense heat would erupt to

the surface in the form of volcanoes.

So, in some places, volcanoes erupted through the surface and, in other places, mountains arose.

• In ancient time locally, the underlying rock wasn’t forced through the surface but, instead, it cooled and reformed to create gypsum!

• Gigantic piece of this gypsum form the core of the Sandia Mountains as well as the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

• Now, do you understand why it is possible to find things like marine fossils in the mountains around Albuquerque?

• The waters mentioned earlier did more than just carry around sediment and marine life, they attracted the areas first tourists:– The Iguanodon!

• Iguanodon weighed approximately 4 tons.• He measured somewhere between 30-40 feet

• Don’t worry! He was an HERBIVORE.

• And the mountains?– The Sandia, today, have two peaks—North and

South. Both peaks are approximately 10,000 feet.– The Sandias are twenty miles long and end in the

south at Tijeras.

• Believe it or not but both the Sandias and the Manzanos continue to rise!

• And…• The Rio Grande Valley continues to drop!

• The Rio Grande Rift– A rift is a place in the earth’s crust where the crust

is thinning and pulling apart.– It is approximately thirty (30) miles long.

Rio Grande Rift

• Over time, this rift has filled with things like clay, gravel, and silt carried by the winds, by gravity and by water.

• This material reaches a depth of 10,000 feet and has collected water for tens of thousands of years!

• This means:– When you drink local water, you are drinking

water that is very, very old!– Indeed, the City of Albuquerque has relied

on this water for more than a century.

– This water is referred to as an underground cache

• AQUIFER• These are underground areas that hold and provide a usable

supply of water.

The main problems regarding groundwater in the Western half of

the United States are that:• The depletion rate is much higher than the

recharge rate.• There is groundwater contamination.

• High groundwater depletion rates harm ecosystems which is detrimental to biodiversity.–Biodiversity is the variety of life in the world

or in a particular habitat or ecosystem• An ecosystem is a biological community of

interacting organisms and their physical environment.

• States' groundwater regulations are too lenient and do not consider the multi-state nature of the resource.– In other words…aquifers often cross state lines

and so decisions in one state affect the people and water of another….

• The previous image is a map of all the groundwater supplies in the United States.

• The light blue section in the center of the map spanning the majority of the United States from South Dakota to Texas and into New Mexico is the Ogallala Aquifer.

This image depicts the saturated thickness of the Ogallala Aquifer. Its saturated thickness is largest in Nebraska, and smallest around Texas. This is a problem because of the extensive dependence New Mexico‘s agriculture has on groundwater. 30% of irrigation water used in the state alone comes from groundwater!

• LASTLY, another major problem concerning the nation’s aquifers is:

• Public policies regarding environmental protection lack long term goals and seem to overlap each other to some extent.– In other words, one law seems to counteract

another law and so on…

• Though the previous picture was taken in Western Texas it says a whole lot about the desperation that people in the South West are feeling in terms of water.

• Farmers are suffering and losing valuable crops!

• Animals are dying from dehydration!• What will we humans do without water?

H2O…the water of life!

• The Rio Grande Valley and the river that has flowed through the region has been the site of human activity for thousands of years.

• Long before Europeans ever laid eyes on the area, Paleo-Indian Peoples called the region home.– Folsom Man– Sandia Man

How did early humans live, interact with each other, hunt and defend themselves? What sorts of tools did they use? This drawing tries to answer some of those questions!

• Imagine a world of snow and ice, when glaciers covered large parts of North America and huge animals, now extinct, roamed the land. The time is the late Ice Age—also known as the Pleistocene—and humans have entered the North American continent for the first time.

• Paleo-Indian Peoples arrived somewhere around 10,000 years ago.

• The climate then was nothing like today and there were actually glaciers on the top of the Sandias and small, shallow lakes on the West Mesa.

• These early inhabitants hunted a variety of now-extinct animals that roamed the Rio Grande Valley:– Mastodon– Wooly Mammoth– Giant Sloth– Giant Armadillo

• Today, New Mexico is a topographically high and generally dry landscape that ranges from high mountain peaks (above 13,000 feet) to rolling plains as low as 3.000 feet.

• The drifting of the North American continent over hundreds of millions of years has brought the state of New Mexico to its present latitude of approximately 35 degrees North latitude placing it in the relatively warm and dry region known as the TEMPERATE ZONE.

• FAULTING and VOLCANISM built New Mexico’s mountain ranges and these forces have also concentrated metals and minerals near the earth’s surface.

• Ancient swamps, forests, and sea floors were the site of accumulation of organic matter that formed into coal, oil, and natural gas.

• So, why did humans come here?– They came for three reasons:• To HUNT• To MINE• To FARM

• These three reasons have not only brought humans here but shaped their settlement patterns.

• Geological processes have played an essential role in determining the climate, the landscape, and the minable resources available.

• The geological history of New Mexico thus created the landscape we see today and has helped to determine the human history of the state.

new mexico

beginning nm

sandia mountains

beginningthe waters

cristo mountains

marine life

local water

earths crust

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