SongshanThese incredible rocks make up what is known as Shuce Cliff, one small part of the Songshan

SongshanThese incredible rocks make up what is known as Shuce Cliff, one small part of the Songshan or Mount Song complex in northern China. Found in China’s Henan Province, Songshan is a geological complex consisting of 5 summits and ridges, the highest of which reaches 1512 meters above sea level. The area is also filled with religious significance, including the presence of Taoist temples and the Buddhist Shaolin Temple where Zen Buddhism is believed to have been founded. The area is also a UNESCO global Geopark, recognizing its geological and historical contributions to the world.The amazingly tilted rocks along this trail are sandstones. Songshan sits near the center of what is called the North China Craton, a piece of ancient, precambrian-aged crust that is now one piece of China. When Pangaea existed about 250 million years ago, there were a few small areas of continental crust that were still out to sea and on their own – much like New Zealand today is a small piece of continental crust that separated from Australia. The North China Craton was one of these blocks.As Pangaea rifted apart, subduction began beneath what is today Asia, and many of these blocks of crust came riding in, docking with the continent and gradually assembling the modern Asian continent.These sandstones are Precambrian in age. This craton contains rocks that are older than 3 billion years in age, making it a truly ancient block of crust comparable to those that build up the metamorphic cores of the other continents. The best age constraint on them comes from measuring zircon grains in the sandstones and finding an age of 2.2 billion years old, but that’s the age the zircon formed in a magma chamber and that zircon grain had to cool off and be eroded before it could be found in this sand, making it a maximum age.Most likely, these sandstones were deposited along with a mountain-building event in this craton that occurred about 1.8 billion years ago. Since then, they have been tilted on their side by a series of mountain building events, starting in the Permian and Triassic as this craton approached its collision with Asia and continuing through the Cretaceous as mountains were built by accretion to the south.-JBBImage credits:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mount_SongReferences:https://bit.ly/39BVQYuhttp://www.globalgeopark.org/aboutGGN/list/China/6413.htmhttps://bit.ly/2CZfHFehttps://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11434-008-0342-1https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1342937X05708315https://bit.ly/2X6mG5Whttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0024493712002034 -- source link

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