It is believed that the name Sandia (Spanish: “Watermelon”) was given to the mountains for the pinkish colour of their … The Sandia Mountains run in a North-South line for 17 miles on the eastern edge of Albuquerque, NM. Variations in thickness indicate deposition on an eroded Precambrian surface. This mountain range continues to the south and is known as the Manzano Mountains in that region.
Sandia Mountains, mountain range in central New Mexico, U.S., northeast of Albuquerque and east of the Rio Grande. The area is particularly important to Albuquerque, the major city of New Mexico, with respect to environment, recreation, urban development, and esthetics.This 1000-piece beauty may be just the thing for a relaxing evening in isolation...Comprehensive coverage of rocks and formations, structure, paleontology, stratigraphy, geologic history, and mineral resources. The Sandia Mountains area covers 400 mi 2 within six 7.5-min quadrangle east and northeast of Albuquerque. There is also some metamorphic rock of age 1.60 billion years. The core of the range consists of Sandia granite, with a U-Pb age of 1453±12 million years.
Tijeras rift belt is principally a Laramide feature as are a few other faults along the eastern flank of the late Tertiary Sandia uplift.We are a research and service division of:The area contains most of the significant Paleozoic to Cenozoic stratigraphic units and a varied representation of the Precambrian rocks of central New Mexico; important stratitectonic relationships are observable there that bear on the understanding of the origin of the Rio Grande depression and of the Sandia Mountains.
The most unusual structure of the area is the Tijeras rift belt bounding the uplift on the southeast. The Sandias were uplifted in the last ten million years as part of the formation of the Rio Grande Rift. This is topped by a relatively thin layer (approximately 300 feet/100 meters) of sedimentary rock (mostly The two ranges are connected by Manzanito Mountains, a smaller subrange of the Manzanos, and divided by interstate 40.
Thick sequences of early and late Tertiary sediments lie in order above the Cretaceous in the Hagan Basin northeast of the uplift. For some of our pages, the random assortment of images is related thematically to the section or page being visited. They form the eastern boundary of the Albuquerque Basin. The section is 16,000 ft thick exclusive of the late Tertiary and Quaternary trough-filling Santa Fe Formation.The long east- to northeast-tilted homocline from the Sandia uplift into the Hagan Basin contains most of the formations of central New Mexico, and is the most complete sequence in the state. Stratigraphic units consist of 1) marine Mississippian and Pennsylvanian shelf beds, 2) continental Permian, Triassic, and Jurassic red beds formed under flood-plain, evaporitic, lacustrine, and eolian environments, and 3) intertonguing marine and flood-plain Cretaceous beds of the Rocky Mountain geosyncline.The Sandia Mountains area is dominated by an eastward-tilted fault block that stands imposingly above the deep Rio Grande trough on the west. Structural relief from uplift to trough is as much as 6 mi; into the basins to the east and northeast relief is 2.5–5 mi.
The Sandia Mountains are a great block of granite and limestone which was uplifted during the formation of the Rio Grande Rift.
If you click on any of our banner images, you will see a larger version of that image with descriptive information like the one above.Off highway 550 north of Bernalillo.We are a research and service division of:
The view to the north/northwest shows the basic geological structure of the SMNHC. Precambrian rocks, prominent in the bold western fault scarp, consist of granite, gneiss, schist, quartzite, and greenstone.
Contacts between the
This belt, 2–3 mi wide, 16 mi long, trending northeastwards, consists mainly of two longitudinal parts: a southwestern folded graben and a northeastern horst. Located largely within a part of the Cibola National Forest, the range extends southward for about 30 miles (48 km), and the mountains continue on as the Manzano Mountains. Contains a topographic map, structure map, structure sections, and color geologic map.