 This place just across the boarder from the ring structure at Manuel Benevides
To get an idea of scale; the mountain here is about a thousand feet from the bottom of the ravine to the top. Contrary to what the textbooks will tell you this was not the result of a volcanic eruption. There is no volcanic vent any where near enough to this mountain to be the source of the trouble. The material you see here is blast melted, splash blankets of stone, not lava. And it's not millions of years old; It is only a few thousand at most.
 We see, meandering below the new skirts of the mountain, and peeking out from under blankets of new stone, the old watercourse of the original terrain. But after eroding gently for eons in the winds, and rains, and with a rich, and diverse ecology these mountains were changed in an instant. And, beneath repeated layers of accreted melt, we can clearly see in the blanketed, silhouetted, shapes, the waves of unimaginable violence.
The layered blankets of melted stone were splashed over this mountain by the nearby above ground explosion of a comet fragment. And there is almost no sign what so ever of a any decomposition of the hanging melt blankets. Yet this is claimed to be a result of a volcanic eruption 30 million years ago.
And that's just not true. The cap rock in the accreted layers of blast melt draped over the top of this mountain like a wet table cloth is a few thousand years old at the very most. As there has been almost no decomposition at all since the event that formed them.
 Look closely at the layering. We will see that the process exists all over the southwest. But no where else is it in such pristine condition. And, with all blast effected materials in place, and in context. Its scientific value as a cypher key for a true and empirical understanding of this type of accretive mountain building / land formation process can not be overstated. Because the entire high plateau above the canyon lands was formed much the same way.
That the stone was in a semi-fluid state during this event is clearly evident in the "wet blanket" way the lower layer stretched down like a table cloth. I know of nowhere else on this continent where an example of this accretive layering posses exists with all materials in undeniable context with their source
 But, just to kick your sense of motion and scale into gear, look to the left. Do you see the little round boulder near the the bottom left, and the track grove it made as it fell, and rolled, across the still soft splashes of melted stone? They are a snapshot in time of the stone of the mountain. And of it's last moments in a fluid state. You can see very clearly by the condition of the boulder, and the track it made in the still soft melt splashes, show no weathering or decomposition at all. It is impossible that this formation is millions of years old. It is a few thousand at most. That "little" ball of stone is 60 feet in diameter. And for a little 3D fun:
The significance is track it made trough the soft blankets of melt. The condition of the impactite, And the groove it made after it fell. Attests to the young age. Note that the groove is on top of the stream bed.
Our burned, and melted mountain is at the bottom about a third of the way over from the left. The epicenter of the blast is at the center. And about a third of the way the up from the bottom. Whatever this object was, it exploded just above that smashed, and broken mountain top in the middle. These objects exploded above,or at ground level in a variety of ways. And the ones like this and it's sister across the boarder that show more shock than heat effects are rare. Even so , for all of the force and power implied in this image note that there is no sign of direct, kinetic impact, with the ground.
Take your time here and just look at it for a minute or two. At first glance it looks like that thing just winked out of existence before hitting the ground. And without leaving anything behind but its kinetic energy in the form of a powerful bow/shock wave. And when it exploded it busted that mountain like so much smashed, and broken, pottery.
 But let's look a little closer. There is a legend so universal that it is found in almost every culture that turquoise is a piece of heaven that has fallen from the sky.And, unless I miss my guess, there are trainloads of the stuff in the mountain sides surrounding the blasted one. The Irony is that there are hundreds of scientists in this world just dyeing to get a piece of a comet.
It has been patiently explained to me by many learned, and studied people, that a multiple thermal impact fire storm has never been observed before. Here's a news flash for them. If anyone ever did witness one of these events they didn't live to tell the tale. If there were survivors of that day they weren't looking. They were huddled in quivering terror in the deepest recesses of a cave system somewhere a thousand miles away. So even then it was the meek who inherited the Earth. And when they emerged from their hiding places their fantastical stories of fire breathing dragons re-making the world with breath that could melt stone would have been discounted as religious myth, or dogma within a few short centuries.
 For all its destructive power this was just one of the final gusts in in a very nasty storm that tossed whole mountains like waves in an angry sea.
|
